Berthold Frank Hoselitz (1913–1995) taught Economics and Social Science at the University of Chicago between 1945 and 1978. His analysis of the role of cultural and sociological factors in economic development was influential and contrasted to Chicago School models of self-interested maximizing behavior. Hoselitz was the founding editor of Economic Development and Cultural Change, a prominent journal in the new research field of economic development. At the Carnegie Institute of Technology Hoselitz taught a course in international economics in 1947–48 that was the only economics course that future Nobel Laureate John Nash took before Nash wrote his pathbreaking thesis on game theory and bargaining.
Biography
Hoselitz was born in 1913 in Vienna. He studied at the University of Vienna from 1932 to 1937, notably attending two seminars by Ludwig von Mises, and received a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree in 1936. Hoselitz was a member of the Austrian Social Democratic Labor Party between 1928 and 1938. He left Vienna when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, as did his father Bela and his brother Kurt. After attempting to go to China, he went to England. In 1942, Hoselitz's mother was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Through a U.S. Quaker organization, Bert Hoselitz found a position at Manchester College in Indiana and taught economics there in 1940–41. He then attended the University of Chicago, obtaining his master's degree in 1945. In 1943, he served as a research assistant for economist Jacob Viner at Yale. In 1945, he took a position as instructor in social sciences and then in 1946 as assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago.
In 1947–48, he held an appointment as associate professor of economics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. While there he taught a course in International Economics in which John Nash was a student. Nash indicates that it was the only course in economics he took before he began graduate study in mathematics at Princeton where he wrote his pathbreaking dissertation at Princeton on game theory and bargaining. Nash credits Hoselitz with influencing his thinking on bargaining with the example of countries negotiating and bargaining on tariffs.
Hoselitz went back to the University of Chicago in 1948. In 1951 he helped found the university's Research Center in Economic Development and Cultural Change and founded the center's journal Economic Development and Cultural Change. In 1953 he was promoted to Professor of Economics and the Social Sciences. Hoselitz served on and chaired a variety of interdisciplinary university committees. At Chicago he also supervised the doctoral thesis of radical economist Andre Gunder Frank, the founder of Dependency Theory. From 1952 to 1962 he took a variety of roles in international missions and conferences on development, and advised El Salvador, India, the U.S. Senate, and UNESCO. Hoselitz retired in 1978, becoming professor emeritus. He continued to edit Economic Development and Cultural Change until 1985 and died in 1995.
Works
Hoselitz addressed topics in economic policy and intellectual history including the economics of war and military occupation, urbanization, stage theories of economic growth, and the entrepreneur. With James Dingwall, Hoselitz translated and edited the first English edition of Carl Menger's Principles of Economics''' (1950), an important text in Austrian economics.
In the early 1950s, Hoselitz's work began to focus on the contrasts in social organization between economically advanced and economically backward countries. He wanted to develop a social science framework for examining the determinants of economic growth. The framework he developed drew heavily on the sociologist Talcott Parsons's theory of social structure, especially what Parsons called "pattern variables of role-definition".
Hoselitz made several distinctions between developed and underdeveloped countries based on these pattern variables: a) developed countries tend to be achievement-oriented, based on objective measures such as educational attainment, while developing countries have used ascribed status factors such as kinship and religion for assigning status and rewards; b) developed countries tend to use universalistic standards, for example in use of the rule of law, whereas developing countries tend more to act more on particularistic, personalized relationships such as caste systems or kinship networks; c) developed economies are characterized by extensive division of labor while developing economies tend to have a less-specialized workforce.