Albert O. Hirschman

Infobox Person
name = Albert O. Hirschman


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birth_date = birth date and age|1915|4|7
birth_place = Berlin, Germany
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occupation = Economist
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Albert Otto Hirschman (b. April 71915, in Berlin, Germany) is an influential American economist who has authored several books on political economy and political ideology. His first major contribution was in the area of development economics. [Hirschman, A. O. (1958) The Strategy of Economic Development. Yale University Press] Here he emphasied the need for unbalanced growth. Because developing countries are short of decision making skills, disequilibria to stimulate these and help mobilize resources should be encouraged. Key to this was enouraging 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: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. The second describes the basic arguments made by conservatives: perversity, futility and jeopardy.

Hirschman was born in Berlin, the son of Carl and Hedwig Marcuse Hirschman. 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.

When war broke out in Europe, he worked with Varian Fry to help many of Europe's leading artists and intellectuals escape from the Nazis. A Rockefeller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley (1941-1943), he served in the United States Army (1943-1946), 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- ).

In 2007, The Social Science Research Council established an [http://www.ssrc.org/hirschman/ annual prize] in honor of Hirschman.

Books

* 1945. "National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade" 1980 expanded ed., Berkeley : University of California Press

* 1955. "Colombia; highlights of a developing economy". Bogotá: Banco de la Republica Press.
* 1958. "The Strategy of Economic Development." New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-00559-8
* 1961. "Latin American issues; essays and comments" New York: Twentieth Century Fund.
* 1963. "Journeys toward Progress: studies of economic policy-making in Latin America." New York: Twentieth Century Fund
* 1967. "Development Projects Observed." Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution
* 1970. "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States." Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-27660-4 (paper).
* 1971. "A bias for hope : essays on development and Latin America". New Haven: Yale University Press.
* 1977. "The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments For Capitalism Before Its Triumph". Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01598-8.
* 1980. "National power and the structure of foreign trade". Berkeley: University of California Press.
* 1981. "Essays in trespassing: economics to politics and beyond". Cambridge (Eng.); New York: Cambridge University Press.
* 1982. "Shifting involvements: private interest and public action". Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
* 1984. "Getting ahead collectively: grassroots experiences in Latin America" (with photographs by Mitchell Denburg). New York: Pergamon Press
* 1984. "Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating Some Categories of Economic Discourse." American Economic Review 72(2): 89-96
* 1985. "A bias for hope: essays on development and Latin America". Boulder: Westview Press.
* 1986. "Rival views of market society and other recent essays". New York: Viking.
* 1991. "The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy". Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-76867-1 (cloth) and ISBN 0-674-76868-X (paper).
* 1995. "A propensity to self-subversion". Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
* 1998. "Crossing boundaries: selected writings". New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass.: Distributed by the MIT Press.

chema Based Articles

* Shu-Yun Ma. "The Exit, Voice, and Struggle to Return of Chinese Political Exiles," Pacific Affairs. Vol. 66, No. 3. (Autumn 1993) Pp. 368-385.
* Michael Laver. "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty revisited: The Strategic Production and Consumption of Public and Private Goods," British Journal of Political Science. Vol. 6. (Oct. 1976). Pp. 463-482.

External links

* [http://www.nybooks.com/authors/1820 The New York Review of Books Bibliography]
* [http://www.amherst.edu/commencement/2004/honorands/hirschman.html Amherst Commencement Recognition]
* [http://www.ssrc.org/hirschman/ Albert O. Hirschman Prize and Lecture]

References