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Relief in Seven Years of Stable Money 183

The “Money Illusion”

In my book The Money Illusion 1 have fully
described why it is that we simply take it for granted
that “a dollar is a dollar’ —that “a franc is a franc,”
and that all money is stable, just as centuries ago, before
 Copernicus, people took it for granted that this
earth was stationary, that there was really such a fact
as a sunrise or a sunset, although we know that sunrise
 and sunset are illusions produced by the earth
rotating around its axis. The reason for the “money
illusion” within one’s own country. is described in the
first chapter of this book, as follows:
“Almost everyone is subject to the ‘Money Illusion’
 in respect to his own country’s currency. This
seems to him to be stationary while the money of
other countries seems to change. It may seem
strange, but it is true, that we see the rise or fall
of foreign money better than we see that of our
own.

“For instance, after the war, we in America knew
that the German mark had fallen, but very few Germans
 knew it. This was certainly true up to 1922,
when, with another economist (Professor Frederick
W. Roman), I studied price changes in Europe. On
my way to Germany I stopped in London and consulted
 with Lord D’Abernon, then British Ambassador
 to Germany. He said: ‘Professor Fisher, you
will find that very few Germans think of the mark
as having fallen. I said: ‘That seems incredible.
Every schoolboy in the United States knows it." But