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This assumption that people could see clearly into the future was crucial to making equilibrium economics work. It was also crucially problematic. “You regard men as infinitely selfish and infinitely farsighted,” Henri Poincaré wrote to mathematical economist Léon Walras in 1901. Infinite selfishness “may perhaps be admitted in a first approximation,” Poincaré allowed. But the assumption of infinite farsightedness “may call for some reservations.”

The events that followed the publication of Fisher’s gold standard argument were a textbook demonstration of the limits to foresight. Gold discoveries in Alaska and South Africa, coupled with the development of a new process for separating gold from ore, set the world on a decades-long inflationary path that no one had foreseen. The way people dealt with rising prices or, more to the point, failed to deal with them convinced Fisher that Bryan had been on to something in 1896.

In the midst of this reexamination, in 1898, a dire personal crisis arose for Fisher: the onset of tuberculosis, the same disease that had killed his father fourteen years before. Only after three years spent in clinics in Southern California, upstate New York, and Colorado Springs and three more operating at half speed back in New Haven did the young professor recover. He came away from the experience with an obsession for good health and a near-messianic fervor to better the world before his death. Fisher became a leading prohibitionist, coauthor of a bestselling hygiene textbook, a disciple of the corn flakes prescribing Dr. Kellogg of Battle Creek, an early backer of the League of Nations, and a prominent advocate of eugenics.