Albert O. Hirschman

Albert Otto Hirschman

Hirschman (left) translates accused German Anton Dostler in Italy 1945
Born (1915-04-07)April 7, 1915
Berlin, German Empire
Died December 10, 2012(2012-12-10) (aged 97)
Ewing Township, New Jersey, United States
Institutions
Field Political economy
Alma mater University of Trieste
Contributions Hiding hand principle
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Albert Otto Hirschman (born Otto-Albert Hirschmann; April 7, 1915 – December 10, 2012) was an influential economist and the author of several books on political economy and political ideology. His first major contribution was in the area of development economics.[1] Here he emphasized the need for unbalanced growth. Because developing countries are short of decision making skills, he argued that disequilibria should be encouraged to stimulate growth and help mobilize resources. Key to this was encouraging industries with a large number of linkages to other firms.

His later work was in political economy and there he advanced two simple but intellectually powerful schemata. The first describes the three basic possible responses to decline in firms or polities (quitting, speaking up, staying quiet) in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970). The second describes the basic arguments made by conservatives (perversity, futility and jeopardy) in The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991).

In World War II, he played a key role in rescuing refugees in occupied France.

Life

Otto Albert Hirschmann was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Carl and Hedwig Marcuse Hirschmann, and brother of Ursula Hirschmann.[2] After he had started studying in 1932 at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, he was educated at the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics and the University of Trieste, from which he received his doctorate in economics in 1938.[2]

Soon thereafter, Hirschman volunteered to fight on behalf of the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War. After France surrendered to the Nazis, he worked with Varian Fry to help many of Europe's leading artists and intellectuals to escape to the United States; Hirschman helped to lead them from occupied France to Spain through paths in the Pyrenees Mountains and then to Portugal.

A Rockefeller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley (1941–1943), he served in the United States Army (1943–1946) where he worked in the Office of Strategic Services,[3] was appointed Chief of the Western European and British Commonwealth Section of the Federal Reserve Board (1946–1952), served as a financial advisor to the National Planning Board of Colombia (1952–1954) and then became a private economic counselor in Bogotá (1954–1956).

Following that he held a succession of academic appointments in economics at Yale University (1956–1958), Columbia University (1958–1964), Harvard University (1964–1974) and the Institute for Advanced Study (1974–2012).

Hirschman helped develop the Hiding hand principle in his 1967 essay 'The principle of the hiding hand'.

In 2001, Hirschman was named among the top 100 American intellectuals, as measured by academic citations, in Richard Posner's book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.[4]

In 2003, he won the Benjamin E. Lippincott Award from the American Political Science Association to recognize a work of exceptional quality by a living political theorist for his book The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph.

In 2007, the Social Science Research Council established an annual prize in honor of Hirschman.[5]

He died at the age of 97 on December 10, 2012, some months after the passing of his wife of over seventy years, Sarah Hirschman (née Chapro).[6]

The Passions and the Interests

This is a history of the ideas laying the intellectual groundwork for capitalism. Hirschman describes how thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries embraced the sin of avarice as an important counterweight to humankind's destructive passions. Capitalism was promoted by thinkers including Montesquieu, Sir James Steuart, and Adam Smith as repressing the passions for "harmless" commercial activities. Hirschman noted that words including "vice" and "passion" gave way to "such bland terms" as "advantage" and "interest."

Hirschman described The Passions and the Interests as the book he most enjoyed writing. According to Hirschman biographer Jeremy Adelman, the book reflected Hirschman's political moderation, a challenge to reductive accounts of human nature by economists as a "utility-maximizing machine" as well as Marxian or communitarian "nostalgia for a world that was lost to consumer avarice."[7]

Herfindahl-Hirschman Index

In 1945, Hirschman proposed a market concentration index which was the square root of the sum of the squares of the market share of each participant in the market.[8] Orris C. Herfindahl proposed a similar index (but without the square root) in 1950, apparently unaware of the prior work.[9] Thus, it is usually referred to as the Herfindahl-Hirschman index.

Books

Selected articles

Schema-based articles

See also

References

  1. Hirschman, A. O. (1958) The Strategy of Economic Development. Yale University Press
  2. 1 2 (in German) Honorary degree awarded to Albert O. Hirschman by Free University of Berlin
  3. Yardley, William (December 23, 2012). "Albert Hirschman, Optimistic Economist, Dies at 97". The New York Times. Retrieved July 23, 2013.
  4. Posner, Richard (2001). Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00633-1.
  5. "Albert O. Hirschman Prize of the Social Science Research Council". Social Science Research Council. Retrieved July 23, 2013.
  6. Green, David (October 12, 2014). "Economist who studied progress and fought fascism dies". Ha’aretz. Retrieved January 6, 2015.
  7. Adelman, Jeremy (April 7, 2013). Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691155678.
  8. 1 2 Albert O. Hirschman (1980-01-01). National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade. University of California Press. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-520-04082-3. ...there was a posterior inventor, O. C. Herfindahl, who proposed the same index, except for the square root...
  9. Orris C Herfindahl (1950). "Concentration in the steel industry". Dissertation: Columbia University. Retrieved 2015-04-06.
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