ABSTRACT
In 1912, Henry Seager initiated an exchange that ultimately involved Frank A. Fetter and Harry Gunnison Brown as well as Irving Fisher. Seager attacked Fisher's "principles" treatment of capital and interest. In 1928, Fisher wrote Brown as he was preparing a revised version of The Rate of Interest. He indicated in the letter that only he and Brown were in agreement as to the essentials of a theory of interest. Fisher's acclaimed publication, The Theory of the Rate of Interest, took an intermediate position In an article in Scientia and later in his Elementary Principles of Economics, Fisher reiterated his theory in simplified form and introduced the term impatience to distinguish his view from Boehm-Bawerk's "agio" theory and to replace the term time preference that Fisher had employed earlier. In summarizing Brown's contributions to this area of economic thought, in the years 1913 to 1931, his influence on Fisher's revision of The Theory of Interest is of the greatest significance.
