Gerald J. Fischer

Author of A Statistical Summary of Shipbuilding Under the U.S. Maritime Commission During World War II (1949) — the standard, yard-level monthly USMC dataset that underlies the entire Liberty-ship learning/forgetting literature: Rapping (1965) and Argote, Beckman & Epple (1990) built on figures derived from his compilation; Thompson (2007) instead constructed new unit-level data "from primary sources at the National Archives" — in part to get around it.

Matters to this vault specifically because Thompson's 2007 paper shows that yard output series derived from Fischer's tabulations assign labor spent on non-Liberty vessels to Liberty ships, which produces a spurious appearance of organizational forgetting — a problem in how later studies combined his tables, which Thompson calls "some important limitations" of the source. Fischer's own 1949 report has not itself been read at primary by this vault.

References

• claim-thompson-2007-attributes-inflated-forgetting-estimate-to-fischer-1949-aggregation-bias

• Related hubs: entity-leonard-rapping · entity-peter-thompson · entity-linda-argote · entity-organizational-forgetting

• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-29-does-peter-thompsons-2007-liberty-ships-paper-establish.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-30-what-does-argote-beckman-epple-1990-itself-report.md

• 2026-10-01 (Cali's review): name check — Thompson's own reference list prints "Fischer, George J. (1949)"; library catalogues (e.g. Open Library) give Gerald J. Fischer for A Statistical Summary of Shipbuilding under the U.S. Maritime Commission during World War II (1949). Kept Gerald, recorded George as an alias, so a search on either lands here.