Günter Schmölders

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Franz Hermann Günter Schmölders (born September 29, 1903 in Berlin ; † November 7, 1991 in Munich ) was a German economist , financial scientist , financial sociologist and social economist .

Life

Schmölders grew up as the son of a lawyer and grandson of the Breslau orientalist Franz August Schmölders , consciously experienced the November Revolution in 1918 , undertook study trips to England , France , the USA and Scandinavian countries and had Heinrich Herkner , Ludwig Bernhard and Herbert von Beckerath as academic teachers . Schmölders was married to a journalist and had three children, his daughter Claudia Schmölders is a cultural scientist in Berlin.

Scientific work

His first scientific work treated the repeated failure of the alcohol ban in many countries as a current political-sociological problem at the time, in which he saw " the limits of the effectiveness of the state " had been reached. By dealing with the political-psychological forces that influenced legislation, he expanded his interests in these phenomena to include taxation, currency and money . He completed his habilitation in 1931 at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin in the subject of economic political science , as economics was traditionally called in Prussia . In 1933 he joined the NSDAP.

In 1934 he received a professorship at the University of Breslau , where he dealt with questions of spatial research and organization , gained practical economic and monetary policy experience in pricing policy and the competition system and came into contact with the Kreisau Circle resistance movement . Schmölders also took part in National Socialist spatial research with essays (see also Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung ; University working groups for spatial research ).

Military service and repeated bombings interrupted his teaching activities, which he did not fully resume until 1947 in Cologne . Schmölders founded the Financial Research Institute at the university and, through his extensive research in the field of finance and tax policy, created the basis for a tax reform that for the first time also included financial psychological aspects.

The American Marshall Plan and the European Payments Union (EPU) created new types of international financial solidarity that drew Schmölder's attention to the international context and the common foundations of monetary and financial policy .

In 1958, Schmölders founded the Research Center for Empirical Social Economics in Cologne , in which theories about economically relevant behavior were examined and analyzed for the first time in an interdisciplinary manner using the means of empirical social research, drawing on findings from psychology , social psychology and sociology . With these studies he established u. a. the control psychology in public finance and helped her to new insights into behavior, attitudes, emotions and motivations of taxpayers towards taxation. In 1960 he published the first empirical findings on tax morality and tax resistance in Germany in The Irrational in Public Finance . Schmölders founded socio-economic behavior research as an empirical science. Guy Kirsch was one of his employees at the time . In 1960 he founded the Central Archive for Empirical Social Research in Cologne, the first archive for survey data in Europe, which is still the most important documentation center for German-language empirical studies. Schmölders was one of the first to take into account the self-interests of those involved and the influence of parties and associations on the formation of political will and thus on economic policy.

Memberships and honors

Günter Schmölders had been a full member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature since 1959 . From 1965 to 1966 he was rector and prorector of the University of Cologne . He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Innsbruck and Ghent . Between 1968 and 1970 he was president of the neoliberal think tank Mont Pelerin Society . Since the late 1970s, he was also a member of the (neo-) conservative think tank Vaduzer Institut. The Federal President awarded him the Great Federal Cross of Merit in 1969 and the Great Federal Cross of Merit with a Star in 1979.

Aftermath

The memory of Schmölders is maintained by the Schmölders Foundation for behavioral research in business life, among others. The foundation, established in 1984, has occasionally awarded scholarships for transatlantic economic research. It awards a prize worth € 3,000. Essays by authors of the Verein für Socialpolitik are awarded , but the foundation is independent of the association itself. The winners were among others

  • 2014 Johannes Rincke, Nadja Dwenger, Henrik J. Kleven and Imran Rasul

Publications (selection)

  • Prohibition in the United States. Leipzig 1930.
  • Money and credit. Economic Policy Problems. Leipzig 1938.
  • Competition as a means of increasing economic performance and selecting performance. Berlin 1942.
  • General tax theory. Berlin 1951.
  • Organic tax reform. Berlin 1953.
  • On the definition of excise duties. Berlin 1955.
  • Financial policy. Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg 1955; Reprint of the 3rd revised edition Heidelberg 2007.
  • Business cycles and crises. Hamburg 1955.
  • Economic behavior research. in: ORDO . Yearbook for the Order of Economy and Society. Volume V, Godesberg 1953, pp. 203-244.
  • The politicians and the currency. Frankfurt / Main 1959.
  • The irrational in public finance. Problems of Financial Psychology. Hamburg 1960.
  • From the "quantity theory" to the "liquidity theory" of money (= treatises of the humanities and social science class of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. Born in 1960, No. 12).
  • History of Economics. Reinbek near Hamburg 1962.
  • Monetary policy. Tübingen, Zurich 1968.
  • Psychology of money. Rowohlt's German Encyclopedia, Vol. 263 to 265, Reinbek near Hamburg 1966.
  • Good and bad money. Frankfurt / Main 1968.
  • Financial and Tax Psychology. Rowohlt's German Encyclopedia, Volume 100/101, Reinbek near Hamburg 1970.
  • The lost subject. Düsseldorf, Vienna 1971.
  • The entrepreneurs in business and society. Essen 1973.
  • Socio-economic behavioral research. (with G. Brinkmann), Berlin 1973.
  • Introduction to monetary and financial psychology. Darmstadt 1975.
  • Economics in teaching and life. Essen 1975.
  • "Got through well"? Life memories. Berlin 1988.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b German biography - Schmölders, Günter. In: www.deutsche-biographie.de. Retrieved October 15, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Günter Schmölders: The state of spatial planning in the USA . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung 1 (1937), Issue 1, pp. 29–36; ders .: German and American spatial planning. A comparison of their requirements and methods . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung 2 (1938), Issue 8, pp. 371–374; ders .: State and economy - and science . In: Raumforschung und Raumordnung 4 (1940), Heft 11/12, pp. 446–449.
  3. ^ Günter Schmölders: The politicians and the currency. Report on a public opinion survey on financial and currency issues in the Third German Bundestag. F. Knapp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1959.
  4. ↑ Economist from Freie Universität awarded Schmölders Prize. In: www.fu-berlin.de. May 27, 2013, accessed October 15, 2015 .
  5. ↑ Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance - Current News Details. In: www.tax.mpg.de. Retrieved October 15, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Prof. Moritz Schularick was awarded the 2015 Schmölders Preis des Verein für Socialpolitik - BGSE - Bonn Graduate School of Economics. (No longer available online.) In: www.bgse.uni-bonn.de. Archived from the original on March 7, 2016 ; accessed on October 15, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Schmölders, Günter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmölders, Franz Hermann Günter (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German economist, founder of empirical social economy, as well as monetary and financial psychology
DATE OF BIRTH September 29, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 7, 1991
Place of death Munich