Alexander Gerschenkron

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Alexander Pavlovich Gerschenkron (born October 1, 1904 in Odessa , Russian Empire ; died October 26, 1978 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ) was an economist and economic historian . He was Professor of Economics ( Economic History ) at Harvard University for around 25 years .

Life

Gerschenkron was born in Odessa in 1904 and emigrated with his family from Russia to Austria in 1920. He studied economics and political science at the University of Vienna , where in 1928 became the Dr. rer. pole. PhD and married in the same year. Until 1938 he worked in the private sector in Vienna and later at various research institutes, most recently at the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. He also taught at the People's University .

After Austria was annexed to the German Reich in 1938, Gerschenkron emigrated with his family to the USA, where he did research at the University of California at Berkeley until 1944 , but without holding a regular position. From 1944 to 1948 he worked in the statistics and research department of the Federal Reserve System . In 1945 he became an American citizen, in 1948 he was appointed to Harvard University , initially as an associate professor and in 1951 as a full professor.

In the following years he received numerous honorary memberships and honorary positions, including being President of the Economic History Association . In 1963 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1970 to the American Philosophical Society . Since 1969 he was a corresponding member of the British Academy .

plant

Gerschenkron was primarily concerned with the process of industrialization , with its conditions, processes and the statistical measurement of economic variables for the 19th century.

Gerschenkron became known beyond the borders of economic history through two phenomena named after him, which he described for the first time:

The Gerschenkron effect describes the fact that the growth rate of a time series can be changed by shifting the base year. In his early work, Gerschenkron dealt with such statistical laws several times . The background was political: the Soviet Union regularly made use of such phenomena to document the supposed functioning of the socialist economic order to the outside world.

The theory of the “advantageousness of backwardness” is also named after Gerschenkron. In 1962, in his work Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective , he showed the extent to which a moderate backwardness compared to other nations can favor a country's rapid economic development. Ironically enough, this “Gerschenkronian backwardness” was also used to explain the surprising development of the USSR at the time.

Fonts

  • Bread and Democracy in Germany. University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 1943
  • Economic Relations with the USSR (= Papers submitted to the Committee on International Economic Policy by its Advisory Committee on Economics. Vol. 5, ZDB -ID 1159910-8 ). Committee on International Economic Policy in cooperation with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, New York NY 1945.
  • Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. A Book of Essays. Belknap Press, Cambridge MA 1962.
  • Continuity in History and Other Essays. Belknap Press, Cambridge MA 1968.
  • Europe in the Russian Mirror. Four Lectures in Economic History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge MA 1970, ISBN 0-521-07721-4 .
  • An economic spurt that failed. Four Lectures in Austrian History. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1977, ISBN 0-691-04216-0 .

literature

  • Nicholas Dawidoff: The Fly Swatter. How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World. Pantheon Books, New York et al. 2002, ISBN 0-375-40027-3 .
  • Henry Rosovsky: Alexander Gerschenkron: A Personal and Fond Recollection. In: The Journal of Economic History. Vol. 39, Issue 4, December 1979, ISSN  0022-0507 , pp. 1009-1013, doi: 10.1017 / S0022050700098727 .
  • Henry Rosovsky (Ed.): Industrialization in Two Systems. Essays in Honor of Alexander Gerschenkron. Wiley, New York NY et al. 1966.
  • Richard H. Tilly : Gerschenkron, Alexander. In: Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Adler – Lehmann. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , pp. 185-187.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gabriela Ann Eakin-Thimme: History in Exile. German-speaking historians after 1933 . Munich 2005 (also dissertation, Frankfurt am Main 1999), p. 17.
  2. ↑ Member History: Alexander Gerschenkron. American Philosophical Society, accessed August 18, 2018 .
  3. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed May 31, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Gerschenkron, Alexander
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gerschenkron, Alexander Pavlovich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Economist and economic historian
DATE OF BIRTH October 1, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Odessa
DATE OF DEATH October 26, 1978
Place of death Cambridge, Massachusetts