Fred Hirsch

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Fred Hirsch (born 6 July 1931 in Vienna , Austria , as Friedrich Hirsch , died 10. January 1978 in Leamington Spa , Warwickshire , United Kingdom ) was a British economist . The wider public was especially through his book Hirsch Social Limits to Growth dt. The social limits to growth , known.

Life

Fred Hirsch was born in Vienna on July 6, 1931. His parents, Bettina and Hans Johannes Hirsch, were active Austrian Social Democrats. In 1934, after the February fighting between the Social Democratic Labor Party and the extreme nationalist government, the family emigrated to Great Britain.

Fred Hirsch graduated from the London School of Economics in 1952 . In the following years he wrote as a journalist for the monthly English-language financial magazine The Banker and the British weekly The Economist , since 1958 only for the latter. From 1963 to 1966 he was the economist's editor . His co-editor, Donald Tyerman, later said of Hirsch that, like Walter Bagehot in the 19th century , after Geoffrey Crowther he was the only Economist author of his time whose contributions became part of the financial and monetary debate. He was skeptical of purely monetarist ideas . His book Money International is regarded as the consolidated version of his writings on monetary policy.

From 1966 to 1972 Hirsch was an advisor to the International Monetary Fund on issues of international monetary policy. It joined two years as a research fellow at Nuffield College of the University of Oxford in. There he worked for the Twentieth Century Fund , now The Century Foundation , on his most famous work, The Social Limits to Growth . In 1975 he became Professor of International Studies at Warwick University . He died on January 10, 1978 at the age of 46 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis .

The social limits of growth

Hirsch achieved greater fame with his book The Social Limits of Growth , published shortly before his death . With the title, Hirsch referred to the Club of Rome's 1971 warnings about the physical limits of growth . According to Hirsch, these would be in the distant future. More obvious - if less apocalyptic - are social limits to growth.

Position goods

Position asset “Living on the outskirts of the city”: Demand leads to urban sprawl and, according to Hirsch, devalues ​​the purchased property, resulting in lavish competition for positions

Hirsch considers material needs to be largely satisfied in advanced societies. As a result, according to Hirsch, positional items are becoming increasingly important, a concept that can also be found in the earlier works of Roy F. Harrod , Thorstein Veblen and James Duesenberry . These are goods that, on the one hand, cannot be increased at will and, on the other hand, lose value the more people consume them. This type of goods is differentiated from “material goods”, for which “mechanization or technical innovation” can lead to a larger production volume without the buyer seeing this changed production method as a loss of quality. The competition for the individual position in society is thereby further fueled, "social scarcity" is generated. This scarcity, based on the relative position and consumption of the members of a society among themselves, cannot be eliminated by growth. Rather, the scarcity of item goods leads to a price increase, so that the share of household expenditure on item items increases. The promise that growth would lead to the satisfaction of future needs and increasing economic equality, and which justify today's renunciation of consumption and today's inequality, cannot be kept because of the scarcity of position goods and must lead to frustration and disappointment.

“The thoughts developed in this book question both the priority and the promise of economic growth in two ways. First - the abundance paradox - economic growth in advanced societies brings preprogrammed disappointments: the sustained and generalized growth process cannot deliver on its promise; it leads to social scarcity. Second - involuntary collectivism - the continuation of the growth process itself is based on certain moral preconditions which are jeopardized by its own success, namely by its individual ethos. Economic growth undermines its social foundations. So these are the two social limits to growth. "

- Hirsch : The social limits of growth, p. 246

reception

The social limits to growth received a wide response in the years after their appearance. In 1980, on the occasion of the appearance of the German translation, the weekly newspaper Die Zeit described The Social Limits to Growth as a classic a few years after its appearance in the USA and Great Britain. Later, the attention decreased significantly. Above all, his contributions to positional goods and the so-called commercialization effect were also taken up, further developed and applied in subsequent decades.

The concept of positional goods is said to be its most famous contribution. It has been used extensively in the study of education, town planning, tourism, or the economics and sociology of culture.

The political philosopher Michael J. Sandel described Hirsch as one of the first economists to emphasize the corrosive effect of markets on non-market norms. Most economists, according to Hirsch, overlooked a phenomenon he called the commercialization effect . They assumed that trading in markets has no effect on the product being traded. According to Hirsch, this assumption played a major role in the expansion of economic approaches to other areas of science in the 1970s, including by Gary S. Becker (see Economic Imperialism ). Hirsch, on the other hand, argued that the market can very well have an impact on the product being traded. He thus justified his thesis of "involuntary collectivism", according to which growth undermines the foundations of the market economy, for example social norms.

Fonts (selection)

  • Money International . Allen Lane, London 1967.
  • with David Gordon: Newspaper Money. Fleet Street and the search for the affluent reader . Hutchinson, London 1975, ISBN 0-09-123920-6 .
  • Social Limits to Growth . Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA a. a. 1976, ISBN 0-674-81365-0 (English, In German: The social limits of growth. An economic analysis of the growth crisis. German by Udo Rennert. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1980, ISBN 3-498-02853-7 ) .
  • with Michael W. Doyle and Edward L. Morse: Alternatives to Monetary Disorder . McGraw-Hill, New York NY et al. 1977, ISBN 0-07-029047-4 .
  • with Richard Fletcher: The CIA and the Labor Movement . Spokesman Books, Nottingham 1977, ISBN 0-85124-171-9 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reinhard Müller: Austrian sociologists in exile 1933 to 1945. In: Archives for the history of sociology in Austria (AGSÖ). September 2000, accessed April 6, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration nach 1933. = International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945. Volume 1: Politics, Economy, Public Life. Saur, Munich a. a. 1980, ISBN 3-598-10087-6 , p. 299; Hans Johannes Hirsch worked a. a. as editor of the magazines Das Kleine Blatt and Arbeiter-Zeitung , Bettina Hirsch was editor-in-chief of the Austrian magazine Die Frau from 1961–1967 .
  3. ^ Ruth Dudley Edwards: The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist, 1843-1993 . Hamilton, London 1993, ISBN 0-241-12939-7 , pp. 846-849 .
  4. ↑ Julie Parson: Fred Hirsch . In: Lotus Illustrated Dictionary of Economics . Lotus Press, Daryaganj New Delhi 2006, ISBN 81-89093-28-2 , pp. 104 .
  5. ↑ Hirsch: The social limits of growth 1980, pp. 64–70, section 2. "Excessive crowds: The case of suburban settlements"
  6. ↑ Hirsch: The social limits of growth. 1980, p. 52.
  7. ↑ Hirsch: The social limits of growth. 1980, p. 52.
  8. ↑ Hirsch: The social limits of growth. 1980, p. 52.
  9. ↑ Hirsch: The social limits of growth. 1980, p. 53.
  10. ↑ Hirsch: The social limits of growth. 1980, pp. 230, 231.
  11. ↑ Donald McL. Lamberton: Social Limits to Growth . In: Economic Analysis and Policy . tape 7 , no. 1 , 1977, pp. 61-67 , doi : 10.1016 / S0313-5926 (77) 50008-2 .
  12. ↑ Thomas Meyer : Foundations of a new theory of western industrial society: Fred Hirsch's "The social limits of growth" . In: Journal of Sociology . tape 12 , no. 1 , 1983, p. 74–85 ( digital version ( PDF; 2.41 MB) ).
  13. ↑ Ralf Dahrendorf : Limits of Equality: Comments on Fred Hirsch . In: Journal of Sociology . tape 12 , no. 1 , 1983, p. 65–73 ( digital version ( PDF; 2.05 MB) ).
  14. ^ Gunter Hofmann : Less state - more politics? When progress shatters its own promises: Fred Hirsch's analysis of the social limits of growth . In: The time . No. 50 , December 5, 1980 ( online ).
  15. ^ A b Carvalho, Rodrigues: On markets and morality: Revisiting Fred Hirsch. 2006.
  16. ↑ Michael J. Sandel : Market Reasoning as Moral Reasoning: Why Economists Should Re-engage with Political Philosophy . In: Journal of Economic Perspectives . tape 27 , no. 4 , 2013, p. 121–140, here pp. 134–135 ( digitized version (PDF; 642.16 kB) ).
personal data
SURNAME Hirsch, Fred
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hirsch, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British economist
DATE OF BIRTH July 6, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna , Austria
DATE OF DEATH January 10, 1978
Place of death Leamington Spa , Warwickshire , United Kingdom