Machlup, Fritz (1902–1983)

Abstract

Fritz Machlup was born in Wiener Neustadt, south of Vienna, on 15 December 1902, and died in New York on 30 January 1983. He studied economics at the University of Vienna in the 1920s under Friedrich von Wieser and Ludwig von Mises, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the gold-exchange standard (Machlup 1925) under the latter. In the years 1922–1932 he pursued a business career in the family cardboard- manufacturing partnership while continuing his intellectual interests in economics and philosophy of science in association with von Mises, Hayek, Haberler, Morgenstern, Felix Kaufmann and Alfred Schütz. During this period he wrote two more books including one (Machlup 1931) dealing with the role of stock-market speculation in capital formation. As business conditions deteriorated in the 1930s he took leave from his partners to accept a Rockefeller fellowship, and spent 1933–1935 in the United States. Upon receiving an appointment at the University of Buffalo in 1935 he liquidated his Austrian business interests, and following a brief stay in England began an academic career in the United States. He moved to Johns Hopkins in 1947, and to Princeton in 1960 to succeed Jacob Viner. At Hopkins he had a profound influence as a graduate teacher and in building up a first-rate graduate programme that achieved national prominence; a list of his students is contained in Machlup (1963), and tributes and testimonials from many of them will be found in Dreyer (1978). At Princeton he was extremely active in his direction of the International Finance Section. Upon his retirement in 1971 he resumed his active career at New York University until his death shortly after his 80th birthday. He was president of the Southern Economic Association (1959), the American Association of University Professors (1962–1964), the American Economic Association (1966), and the International Economic Association (1971–1974).