If you are a longtime follower of the American Mustache Institute and our "Monthly Mustache Interview," you may remember Time magazine writer Justin Fox and the interview we did with him in June of 2008.

Fox, a clean shaven mortal who suffers from Bare Upper Lip Disorder (BULD), is a friend to people of mustached American descent, and writes Time's very fine Curious Capitalist blog. He also has a new book out which made the St. Louis Post-Dispatch list of 15 nonfiction books to read this summer. It's called "The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward & Delusion on Wall Street" and we urge you to purchase here despite the fact that Fox promised to hook us up with Tom Friedman of the New York Times and it never came to fruition (he did buy us a few beers once, however).

Fox is still a good man, an excellent writer, and a friend to our community. Our discussion with him about the new book follows:

AMI: So as we discussed during our last interview, this book has been in the works for awhile. About 48 years to be exact. Tell us a little bit about it and what you hope to accomplish with it.

JF: I signed the book contract in mid-2003. So that’s 6 years, which is of course 48 in tiny-dog years. For much of that time my only hope was to finish it and not totally embarrass myself. But now that it’s getting good reviews and all (and has made the St. Louis Post-Dispatch list of 15 nonfiction books to read this summer, as if anybody ever reads 15 nonfiction books in a summer), my goals are manifold:

1. Not totally embarrass myself;
2. Make enough money to buy myself some better clothes;
3. Teach the world about where this silly idea that financial markets are perfectly rational came from, and why it’s wrong;
4. Reintroduce readers to the great, if deeply flawed, mustachioed-American Irving Fisher.

AMI: Clearly a lot has happened since you began writing this fine piece of literature on-par with the New Testament. In 2003 we could still see the tech bust in the rear view mirror, people were blaming anything that was wrong with the economy on 9/11 whether it was relevant or not, housing prices were climbing fast, the economy began to speed along, and then it call came crashing down. How has this roller coaster shaped it, if at all?

JF: What was going on in the outside world didn’t have all that much impact until the past year or two. The book is about an intellectual debate that’s been going on for a century, so I didn’t want to place all too much weight on recent events. But the whole financial-world-almost-falling-apart thing seemed kind of relevant, so that’s what I ended up focusing on in the introduction and epilogue. I imagine that if I had written the whole book during and after the financial meltdown, I might have taken a less even-handed approach in it (Roger Lowenstein complained about what a softy I was in his review in the Washington Post). But I’m hoping even-handed will play better over time.

AMI: Well we all know the Washington Post are all Fascists with the exception of sports writer Dan Steinberg (who we interviewed here), so who the hell really cares, heah? Regardless You mentioned earlier you wished to reintroduce readers to a great, yet deeply flawed Mustached American – Irving Fisher.  Because I have a mustache, I chose to ignore it prior, but now I’ll come back around.  Tell us about Mr. Fisher and the role he plays in both your book and Mustached American history.

JF: If I could get a mention on Steinberg’s DC Sports Bog my career would be made. Fat chance of that, though.

Anyway, Irving Fisher was the first great American economist. He was also pretty nutty. He almost died of tuberculosis in the late 1890s, not long after he got his PhD in economics and math at Yale, and after that he became obsessed with both his own well-being (he was a disciple of the also pretty nutty Dr. Kellogg of Battle Creek—portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in The Road to Wellville—and ate lots of raw eggs) and that of the world at large (he was a prominent backer of Prohibition, the League of Nations, and eugenics).

He was full of great economic ideas, such as inflation-linked government bonds, which he proposed in 1912 and the Treasury Department finally got around to creating in 1997. But he also let his mathematical, rational view of the economic world lead him astray, most infamously when he declared on Oct. 15, 1929 that stock prices had reached “what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Oops!

Oh, and Fisher had a lovely and very full mustache.