Fred Hirsch

Fred Hirsch (6 July 1931 – 10 January 1978) was Professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick. He was born in Vienna. In 1934, after the Austrian Civil War, his family emigrated to Britain. Hirsch graduated with first class honours from the London School of Economics in 1952 before working as a financial journalist on The Banker and The Economist (financial editor, 1963–1966). He was a senior adviser to the International Monetary Fund, from 1966 to 1972 where he worked on international monetary problems.

Afterwards he spent two years as a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1972 to 1974, where he started working on his book The Social Limits to Growth (RKP, 1977), having previously written The Pound Sterling: A Polemic (V Gollancz, 1965), Money International (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1967), and Newspaper Money: Fleet Street and the search for the affluent reader (with David Gordon) (Hutchinson, 1975) . In 1975 he joined the University of Warwick as Professor of International Studies. A year later he contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis leading to his death on January 10, 1978.

Hirsch's most influential book concerned the inherent limits to growth, including both the concept of positional goods and what he called the 'commercialisation effect'.

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