How Economics Should Be Complicated

This volume brings together select texts representative of the full range of intellectual output of one of the greatest and most eclectic economists of our time, Albert O. Hirschman. Covering a time span of over forty years, they recall his most prominent books and include many additional themes taken from essays of wide-ranging origin and content. The title How Economics Should Be Complicated has the dual sense of an endpoint and a central and recurrent theme in the author’s experience, which unfolds in his critical—but constructive—relationship with economic theory, his openness to other social sciences and his democratic and "possibilist" political inspiration. This stands as the basis of an important lesson in intellectual rebirth.

Albert O. Hirschman, born in Berlin in 1915 and a refugee from Nazi Germany, graduated from the University of Trieste in 1938. He moved to the United States in 1940, joined the army during the war, worked in the Marshall Plan for the Federal Reserve, and then, for the World Bank, advised the Colombia Government on development. Hirschman taught at Columbia and Harvard universities and has been Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Luca Meldolesi, born in Rome in 1939, taught at the universities of Rome, Calabria and Naples, collaborated with Hirschman on numerous books and articles and has applied Hirschman’s point of view in his teaching, grass roots initiatives and in government on behalf of the Italian South.