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A sleeper hit of economics! Its brilliant insights have become ever more relevant as liberal capitalism confronts challenges from austerity to the global race for resources. A book whose message is more urgent now than on its publication nearly 50 years ago. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Daniel Halliday.
List of contents
Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition Daniel Halliday
Preface 1. Introduction: The Argument in Brief
Part 1: The Neglected Realm of Social Scarcity 2. A Duality in the Growth Potential 3. The Material Economy and the Positional Economy 4. The Ambiguity of Economic Output
Part 2: The Commercialization Bias 5. The Economics of Bad Neighbors 6. The New Commodity Fetishism Appendix. The Commercialization Effect: The Sexual Illustration 7. A First Summary: The Hole in the Affluent Society
Part 3: The Depleting Moral Legacy 8. An Overload on the Mixed Economy 9. Political Keynesianism and the Managed Market 10. The Moral Re-entry 11. The Lost Legitimacy and the Distributional Compulsion
Part 4: Perspective and Conclusions 12. The Liberal Market as a Transition Case 13. Inferences for Policy.
Bibliography Index
About the author
Fred Hirsch was an Austrian-born British economist and Professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick. Born in Vienna in 1934, after the Austrian Civil War, his family emigrated to Britain. Hirsch graduated at the London School of Economics in 1952 before working as a financial journalist on
The Banker and
The Economist, where he was financial editor from 1963-1966. He was a senior adviser to the International Monetary Fund from 1966 to 1972, before becoming a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1972 to 1974. Already the author of several books, it was here that he started work on his best-known work,
Social Limits to Growth (RKP, 1977). In 1975 he joined the University of Warwick as Professor of International Studies, where he worked until his death in 1978 at the age of forty-four.
