Frank A. Fetter was a leading American follower of Carl Menger and the early Austrians. He was the first economist to develop a complete statement of the pure time preference theory of interest, and he revolutionized the theory of rent which had been developed by David Ricardo and the classical economists and was still accepted by economists 100 years later.
Both Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard were heavily influenced by Fetter’s writings. Economic Principles is the culmination of Fetter’s work and provides a complete and systematic exposition of economic theory based on the Austrian subjective-value approach. Murray Rothbard mentioned it as one of the great economics treatises written before the First World War.
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Frank Albert Fetter was the leader in the United States of the early Austrian school of economics. Fetter is largely remembered for his views on business “monopoly” and for a unified and consistent theory of distribution that explained the relationship among capital, interest, and rent.
Born in rural Indiana, Fetter was graduated from the University of Indiana in 1891. After earning a master’s degree at Cornell University, Fetter pursued his studies abroad and received a doctorate in economics in 1894 from the University of Halle in Germany. Fetter then taught successively at Cornell, Indiana, and Stanford universities. He returned to Cornell as professor of political economy and finance (1901-1911) and terminated his academic career at Princeton University (1911-31), where he also served as chairman of the department of economics.
NY: Century, 1915. Print on Demand
