Fritz Machlup

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Fritz Machlup (December 15, 1902-January 30, 1983) was an Austrian-American economist. He was notable for being one of the first economists to examine knowledge as an economic resource.

Born in Wiener-Neustadt, he earned his doctorate at the University of Vienna. He fled Nazi Germany for the United States in 1933 and became a US citizen in 1940. Machlup's key work was The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (1962), which is credited with popularizing the concept of the information society. Shortly before his death he completed the third in a series of ten planned volumes collectively called Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution, and Economic Significance.