Fritz Machlup

Fritz Machlup

Fritz Machlup (1902-1983) was Austrian American economist.

Life

Fritz Machlup was born December 15, 1902 in Wiener-Neustadt, Austria. He received his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 1923 with a dissertation on the gold bullion stan­dard) and was active as awriter on economics and in his family's cardboard manufacturing business. Early in 1933, Machlup came to the United States on a Rockefeller scholarship and visited Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago where he met many of the world's leading economists. In 1935 he returned to Austria, liquidated his business interests, and, in 1936 became a pro­fessor at the University of Buffalo until 1947, but spent time at numerous other universities and served in the United States government during during World War II.

In 1947 Machlup accepted a position at the Johns Hopkins University and in 1960, Machlup moved to Princeton University as professor of Economics and director of Princeton's International Finance Section. The year be­fore his retirement from Princeton, Machlup began to teach regular courses at New York University in 1971. He received a professorship in economics from New York University in 1972 and continued teaching there until he died on January 30, 1983 in Princeton, New Jersey..

Contributions

Machlup divided information use into instrumental, intellectual, and pastime knowledge categories. He recognized that knowledge was a critical resource and explored the economics of information and of knowledge and began a 10 volume series, Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution, and Economic Significance, of which only three were completed.

With Una Mansfield he commissioned and edited a wide-ranging set of essays on how information is understood in several disciplines and added two commentaries: The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages, 1984.

Publications

Machlup wrote primarily on economics. Publications relating to information and knowledge include:

• The production and distribution of knowledge in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962.
• Information through the printed word : the dissemination of scholarly, scientific, and intellectual knowledge. With Kenneth Leeson and associates. New York: Praeger, 1978-1980. 4 vols.
• Knowledge, its creation, distribution, and economic significance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980-1984. Intended as a new edition of Production and distribution (1962) in 10 volumes, only three were published: Vol. 1: Knowledge and knowledge production, 1980; v. 2. The Branches of learning, 1982; v. 3: The economics of information and human capital, 1984.
• The Study of information : interdisciplinary messages. Ed. by Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield. New York: Wiley, 1983. Note his prologue, "Cultural diversity in studies of information," pp 3-57 and his postscript, "Semantic quirks in studies of information," pp 641-671.

Offices

• American Economic Association. President, 1966.
• International Economic Association. President, 191-1974.
• American Association of University Professors. President, 1962-1964.

Awards

Machlup received many honors, honorary doctorates, and medals.

Further reading

• Malkiel, Burton G.. "Fritz Machlup". In: Luminaries: Princeton Faculty Remembered, ed. by Patricia H. Marks, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 182-189.
• "Fritz Machlup." Wikipedia [1]
• Haberler, Gottfried. "Fritz Machlup: In Memoriam," Cato Journal 3, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 11-14. [2]
• Thornton, Mark. Biography of Fritz Machlup (1902-1983). Mises Institute. 2007. [3]
• Breadth and depth in economics : Fritz Machlup - the man and his ideas. Ed. by Jacob S. Dreyer. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1978.

Papers

• Stanford University. Hoover Institute Archives. Fritz Machlup Papers, 1911-1983. Finding list has detailed chronology. [4]