Frank A. Fetter, “Amerika” (1927)

This file is a German-language country chapter in an edited comparative survey of contemporary economic theory, not an independent treatise. Within the volume’s contributor structure, Fetter supplies the American section; the chapter surveys institutions, schools, journals, and theorists, ending with a translator’s note on terms such as “Grenznutzentheorie” and “Wirtschaftswissenschaft.” Fetter’s main thesis is that American economics since the 1880s developed through a distinctive synthesis: German historical influence, Austrian marginalism, native psychological theory, and an expanding empirical-statistical apparatus.

Ein getreues Bild von dem gegenwärtigen Stande der ökonomischen Theorie in Amerika zu geben, ist besonders schwer für jemanden, der selbst mitten in dem zu beschreibenden Gedankenkreise steht.

English translation: To give a faithful picture of the present state of economic theory in America is particularly difficult for someone who himself stands in the very midst of the intellectual circle to be described.

The chapter begins by stressing scale and dispersion: American economics had grown quickly, with many professional economists spread across universities and business schools. Fetter then traces the post-Civil War break from English classical laissez-faire. German-trained figures such as Richard T. Ely and John Bates Clark, along with Francis A. Walker, helped found a more reformist and theoretically ambitious discipline, institutionalized in the American Economic Association and its journals.

Diese jungen Leute brachten einen neuen Geist in das Studium der Wirtschaftswissenschaften in Amerika.

English translation: These young men brought a new spirit into the study of economics in America.

Fetter insists that American theory did not choose between history and abstraction. The AEA’s founders valued historical inquiry, but the association unexpectedly stimulated theoretical debate. The result was methodological pluralism rather than historicist anti-theory.

Der Begriff der historischen Relativität ist überall ziemlich durchgängig anerkannt.

English translation: The concept of historical relativity is nearly everywhere quite generally acknowledged.

The central intellectual movement is the rise of a “psychological” economics. Simon Patten shifted attention toward consumption, dynamics, and social psychology. Clark reformulated value, capital, and distribution, especially through marginal analysis and a value-capital concept. Hadley, Fisher, Davenport, and Fetter himself extended debates over capital as investment, income as flow, opportunity cost, rent, interest, and distribution as branches of valuation. Fetter’s strongest conceptual claim is that the marginal revolution displaced the old materialist order of rent, wages, and costs by centering choice, wants, and valuation.

Der neue Zug, der den Ausdruck „psychologische National-ökonomie“ rechtfertigt, war nicht bloß der mehr mechanische oder logische Einfall der Grenzanalyse, sondern war die Verschiebung des Schwergewichtes des Interesses von der äußeren physischen Welt auf die Gefühle, den Verstand und die Bedürfnisse des Menschen.

English translation: The new feature that justifies the expression "psychological economics" was not merely the more mechanical or logical device of marginal analysis, but the shifting of the center of gravity of interest from the outer physical world to the feelings, understanding, and needs of man.

The Austrian school appears not as a foreign doctrine passively imported, but as a catalyst arriving at the right “psychological moment.” Fetter presents American marginalism as indebted to Austria yet not identical with it: American writers altered capital theory, generalized distribution theory, and developed opportunity cost. Against MacVane and other cost theorists, he argues that supply and demand are both forms of valuation; against older distribution theory, he treats wages, rent, and interest as unified value problems.

The most polemical section addresses Veblen and the institutionalists. Fetter grants their energy and their stress on institutions, statistics, and social welfare, but rejects their charge that marginal theory is merely hedonistic, static, or apologetic. He presents institutionalism as mainly negative criticism without a constructive substitute, and argues that historical, statistical, and institutional research should supplement rather than replace analytical theory.

Heute ist die dringendste Aufgabe nicht so sehr, neue Vorposten zu erobern und zu besetzen, als vielmehr die schon genommenen zu sichern und das Kampfgebiet neu abzustecken.

English translation: Today the most urgent task is not so much to conquer and occupy new outposts, but rather to secure those already taken and to newly stake out the field of battle.

The final part turns into a research agenda: abandon the rigid triad of land, labor, and capital; clarify capital as valuation and investment; refine psychological theories of interest; generalize rent beyond land; rethink wages without subsistence or wage-fund doctrines; integrate monopoly, welfare, law, property, and public policy; and use sociology, history, psychology, and statistics without dissolving economics into them. Its relevance lies in showing American economics as already welfare-oriented and interdisciplinary, but still dependent on marginal analysis as its organizing logic.

Über die Unwirklichkeit des „homo oeconomicus“ wird nicht länger disputiert und es wird eingesehen, daß die ökonomischen Motive ihre Quellen in allen Bereichen des menschlichen Lebens haben können.

English translation: The unreality of the "homo oeconomicus" is no longer disputed, and it is recognized that economic motives may have their sources in all spheres of human life.