Gerhard Meyer (economist)

Gerhard Emil Otto Meyer (born January 16, 1903 in Altenbruch ; † December 30, 1973 in Chicago ) was a German economist.

Life and activity

Meyer was the son of a pastor. After attending school, he studied economics in Halle, Tübingen, Rostock and Kiel from 1921 to 1925. In 1925 he passed the examination to become a graduate economist in Rostock. In the summer semester of 1925 he taught economics at the Habertshof adult education center. He then continued his studies in Kiel.

In the 1920s, Meyer worked for the later Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief at the Institute for the World Economy in Kiel.

Meyer received his doctorate in 1930 with a thesis on the agricultural cycle supervised by Adolph Lowe at the University of Kiel. In this he criticized the harvest theories of HL Moore and William Stanley Jevons , the theoretical foundation of which he considered obsolete, particularly against the strict periodicity of the agricultural and business cycles. His positive approach was based on a thesis, primarily advocated by James Wilson , according to which bad harvests - given the inelastic demand for grain - would tie up such a large part of the purchasing power of consumers that industrial production would have to be restricted. Before that, he had supervised the elasticity studies in Leontief's study An attempt to statistically analyze supply and demand .

In 1932 Meyer followed his teacher Lowe as a researcher at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main. There he worked closely with Friedrich Pollock and Kurt Mandelbaum .

A few months after the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, the Institute for Social Research was forcibly closed. Meyer then emigrated to France that same year, where he worked from 1934 to 1935 at the Paris branch of the Institute for Social Research. This was followed by a brief employment at the institute's Geneva branch. During these years he wrote several articles on the theory and politics of the planned economy in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung .

In 1935 Meyer went to Great Britain. There he worked as a research assistant at the University of Manchester . At that time he was studying the theory of technological unemployment. In 1937 Meyer moved to the United States, where he got a job at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago . In 1965 he received the rank of Professor of Social Sciences there.

After his emigration, the National Socialist police officers classified Meyer as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus regarded as particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be successful if they were successful Invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested by the occupying troops following SS special commandos with special priority.

Fonts

• Critical and positive contributions to the theory of the Agra cycle. The Crisis Theory by William Stanley Jevons , 1930.
• On the theory of the planned economy, in: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 3/1934, pp. 228–262. (in cooperation with Kurt Mandelbaum)

literature

• Klemens Wittebur: The German Sociology in Exile, 1933–1945: a biographical cartography , p. 100.
• Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (ed.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 2: Leichter-Zweig. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , pp. 448f.