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Adolph Lowe born Adolf R. Löwe (4 March 1893 – 3 June 1995) was a German sociologist and economist. Events 51 - Nero, later to become Roman Emperor, is given the title Princeps iuventutis (head of the youth Year 1893 ( MDCCCXCIII) was a Common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian calendar (or a Common Events 350 - Roman usurper Nepotianus, of the Constantinian dynasty, proclaims himself Roman Emperor, entering Year 1995 ( MCMXCV) was a Common year starting on Sunday. Events of 1995 Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany ( ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant is a Country in Central Europe.

Contents

Life and work

Adolph Lowe was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Stuttgart, Germany. Stuttgart (ˈʃtʊtgaɐ̯t is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany ( ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant is a Country in Central Europe. His father, Alexander Löwe, was a merchant, and his mother, Ottilie Mayer Löwe, was a homemaker. [1]

He was for a long time the "eminence grise" of the New School for Social Research. This is about the university in New York; for other uses see New School (disambiguation. He studied first in Munich, and then in the University of Berlin with Franz Oppenheimer. Munich (München; Minga is the capital city of Bavaria, Germany. Franz Oppenheimer (born 30 March 1864 in Berlin; died 30 September 1943 in Los Angeles) was a German Sociologist Here he studied both sociology and economics. As a veteran of World War I, he helped plan the postwar demobilization of the German army, and served in the Socialization Committee which sought to nationalize the German economy. World War I (abbreviated WWI; also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All In 1922, Lowe joined the Ministry of Economics of the Weimar Republic. The term Weimar Republic ( ˈvaɪmarɐ repuˈbliːk is used by historians to signify the democratic and Republican period of Germany from 1919 to 1933

In 1926, Lowe joined the Kiel Institut für Weltwirtschaft, a center dedicated to business cycle research whose other members included Fritz Burchardt, Gerhard Colm, Jacob Marschak and Hans Neisser. For the city in the United States, see Kiel Wisconsin. For the name see Kiel (name. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy (Institut für Weltwirtschaft an der Universität Kiel abbreviated IfW) is one of the leading economic research institutes in Kiel The term business cycle or economic cycle refers to the fluctuations of economic activity during its long term growth trend Jacob Marschak (* 23 July 1898 Kiev, Imperial Russia, now capital of Ukraine; † 27 July 1977 Los Angeles His famous 1926 WWA article was a cogent critique of the existing division between business cycle literature and equilibrium economic theory, and called for the development of an endogenous theory of economic fluctuations. General equilibrium theory is a branch of theoretical Microeconomics.

Drawing on a Central European tradition that stemmed from Marx's scheme of extended reproduction, Lowe found a new manner of conceiving motion in business cycle theory. Lowe's concern with changing multisectoral structure over the cycle, as outlined in his 1926 essay, preceded and inspired a similar notion in the young Friedrich Hayek's business cycle theory. Friedrich August von Hayek CH ( May 8, 1899 March 23, 1992) was an Austrian British Economist Lowe's own subsequent work, in particular the analysis of the "traverse" from one growth equilibrium to another (1952, 1954, 1976), has its roots in this paper.

Lowe gravitated to the University of Frankfurt in 1931 where he came into fruitful contact with Horkheimer, Adorno and other members of the "Frankfurt School" - an influence that never left him. The surname Horkheimer may refer to Jack Horkheimer, American astronomer and television host Max Horkheimer, Jewish-German philosopher and Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno ( September 11, 1903 &ndash August 6, 1969) was a German -born international sociologist The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist Critical theory, Social research, and Philosophy. As a Jewish social democrat, ex-member of the German Socialization Committee and an architecht of the Weimar Republic, Adolph Lowe's position in Nazi-controlled Germany was quite untenable and he was one of the first to be removed. Social democracy is a Political ideology of the left and centre-left Nazism, which was a short name for National Socialism (Nationalsozialismus refers primarily to the Ideology and practices of the National Socialist German He left in 1933 to take up a position at the University of Manchester. The University of Manchester is a " red brick " civic University located in Manchester, England. Lowe left England in 1940, being perceived as an "enemy alien" - in spite of his naturalization and past history. His Price of Liberty (1936) outlines some of his impressions of Great Britain.

During his stay at Frankfurt and Manchester, Lowe moved away from business cycle research he had pursued at Kiel and towards social philosophy and economic methodology. Social philosophy is the philosophical study of questions about social Behavior (typically of Humans. Economic methodology is the study of methods usually Scientific method, in relation to Economics (Boland 1987 p His famous 1935 Economics and Sociology, was exactly what its subtitle indicates: a "plea for cooperation in the social sciences". As he outlined there and in a few follow-up articles (1936, 1942), conventional economic equilibrium theory rested ultimately not only on a rather debatable conception of mechanistic rationality but also conditional on the assumption of the constancy and uniformity of individual behavior. Rationality as a term is related to the idea of Reason, a word which following Webster's may be derived as much from older terms referring to This assumption, in Lowe's view, was not only unrealistic, but also unnecessarily restrictive and removed most of what was interesting (and necessary) for the analysis of economic motion. Lowe's doubts about the assumption of the "universality" of specific economic behavior echoed the position of the German Historical School of previous generations. This is an article about a school of thought in the area of Law. His hopes for fruitful interaction between economics and sociology in this regard also dovetailed with his interest in the role and structure of universities (1937, 1940).

At the "New School"

Lowe arrived at the New School for Social Research as the director of the "Institute of World Affairs" - that institution's attempt to resurrect the old Kiel Institute. This is about the university in New York; for other uses see New School (disambiguation. His indefatigable efforts in this regard led him to temporarily suspend his work on economic methodology and social structure.

His 1951 article attacking the "mechanistic approach" to economics signalled his return to this field. His pre-war questions began to take a more definite form around this time - namely, in two issues which dominated the rest of his career, the "economic traverse" and "instrumental analysis". Underlying both of these concepts was the recognition of changing and heterogeneous behavioral patterns - the crux of Lowe's pre-war musings. If this is granted, then the approach of orthodox economic theory was practically irrelevant as the object of study was continuously changing. As noted, the analysis of the "traverse", already implicitly contained in his Kiel work, but only really formulated in the 1950s (e. g. 1952, 1954, 1955), addressed the issue of movements from a particular growth path to another and the detailing of the implied adjustment paths and the modifications in behavioral and economic structures which both engender and are implied by them. Thus, the dynamics behind the traverse, he envisioned to be related to socio-economic evolution which should not, indeed could not, be considered an exclusively economic phenomenon. He continued developing his ideas on the relationship between evolution and growth, in particular, outlining the role of changing behavior and multiple behavior patterns on the resulting economic process.

Lowe's "instrumental analysis" proposed to sidestep the problem of tractability implied by changing structure by considering a type of economics which combined both prescribed behavioral patterns and economic analysis when dealing with economic policy. In Lowe's view, behavior was endogenous - both to economic structure and economic policy. As any economic analysis or prescription is conditional on a particular type of behavior, then Lowe concluded, economic policy must ultimately tackle the twin tasks of "setting" the behavioral configurations and using the "appropriate" theory implied by that behavior.

Lowe's work on the traverse and instrumental analysis is best laid out in his two great works, On Economic Knowledge (1965) and The Path of Economic Growth (1976), and his article "Toward a Science of Economics" (1969) - which were received with bewilderment by much of the economics profession. Not quite used to this kind of post-eighteenth century thinking, economists were caught between accusing him of being an "anti-theorist", an "authoritarian" or simply a troublemaker. Of course, he was none of these (except perhaps the last). Firstly, as noted, he gave a central role to economic theory in his system - indeed, if anything, he perhaps allowed for too many economic theories. Furthermore, Lowe went to great pains to note that his "instrumentalism" is far from a prescription for socialist policy. Indeed, Lowe stressed quite the contrary: that freedom is ultimately only possible in a constrained scenario - indeed, it can only be "defined" within constraints. Lowe's notions of "constrained freedom" and "spontaneous conformity" were standard concepts long familiar to sociologists and philosophers - and can even be found in earlier writers, such as Goethe. ˈjoːhan ˈvɔlfgaŋ fɔn ˈgøːtə (in English generally ˈgɝːtə 28 August 1749 22 March 1832 was a German writer

Lowe's contributions in a modern perspective

In fact, in a modern light, Lowe's position is almost self-evident. If one recognizes the mutability of economic behavior, then policy must ultimately take behavioral considerations into account. In recognizing that economic policy can set the parameters within which individual behavior operates, Lowe thus sets out a proposition similar in tone to the later "Lucas critique" of econometric policy analysis. The Lucas Critique, named for Robert Lucas 's work on macroeconomic policymaking says that it is naive to try to predict the effects of a change in economic policy entirely on Econometrics is concerned with the tasks of developing and applying Quantitative or Statistical methods to the study and elucidation of economic principles Where Lowe goes one step ahead of Lucas, then, is in suggesting that these parameters should themselves be considered as policy instruments - which does not sound as too radical a proposition by modern standards when one considers, say, the "reputation" debate on monetary policy and inflation and indeed, the Public Choice school. Monetary policy is the process by which the Government, Central bank, or monetary authority of a country controls (i the Supply of Money, In economics inflation or price inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services over a period of time Public choice in economic theory is the use of modern Economic tools to study problems that are traditionally in the province of Political science. Thus, in modern light, the charges of "incipient authoritarianism" that were heaped upon Lowe during the 1960s and 1970s seem obviously untenable. However, to Cold War contemporaries, Lowe's propositions were uncomfortable - even though Lowe suggested examples that ought to be familiar to them (e. Cold War is the state of conflict tension and competition that existed between the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR and their respective allies from the g. how is laissez-faire sustainable without anti-trust legislation?). Laissez-faire ( pronunciation: French,; English,) is a French phrase literally meaning Let do (“allow to do” United States antitrust law is the body of Laws that prohibits anti-competitive behavior (monopoly and Unfair business practices.

Almost alone among economists, the American Institutionalists recognized that Lowe's analysis resonated with their own work - and appropriately granted him the Veblen-Commons Award. In his subsequent lecture (1980), he reiterated his position on instrumental analysis - and chastising economists of all stripes for overemphasizing either theory or empiricism. In Philosophy, empiricism is a theory of Knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from Experience. Like Veblen almost a century before, Lowe reiterated that the need was for a new economics which could incorporate the insights of both and, at the same time, stretch far beyond them.

Although it was never the primary focus of Lowe's research activity, in the course of his work on economic methodolgy he has also made valuable contributions to economic history and the history of economic thought. Economic history is the study of how economic phenomena evolved in the past The history of economic thought deals with different thinkers and theories in the field of Political economy and Economics from the ancient world to the present One of his most prominent students in the latter field was Robert Heilbroner. Robert Heilbroner ( March 24, 1919 &ndash January 4, 2005) was an American Economist and historian of economic thought

Lowe "retired"(sic) in 1963, remaining at the New School as a lecturer, until he returned to Germany in 1983. There he died in [[Wolfenbüttel] at the age of 102. Until the end of his life, he still clung optimistically to his great and as yet unfulfilled hope: the fruitful interdisciplinary communication between economics and sociology.

Major publications of Adolph Lowe

Secondary sources

External links

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