Bertram Schefold (born 28 December 1943 in Basel) is a Swiss economist and an Economics professor at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main specializing in economic theory with a particular focus on capital theory and the history of economic thought.
Life and career
Schefold's father, Karl Schefold, was an archaeologist. His mother Marianne Schefold, born "von den Steinen", was the daughter of Karl von den Steinen. The family migrated in the 1930s from Germany to Switzerland. Starting his school years in Basel, he received a diploma degree in mathematics, theoretical physics and philosophy in Munich, Hamburg and Basel in 1967. He served for a year as President of the Verbandes der Schweizer Studierendenschaften(de) in Bern. Afterwards, he started studying Klassische Nationalökonomie(de) in Basel and Cambridge, United Kingdom. After he finished his doctoral studies, he assumed a lecturer job in Basel from 1971 to 1972. Afterwards, he was a visiting scholar at Trinity College in Cambridge, as well as at Yale University. Moreover, he was a research associate at Harvard.
Schefold has been a professor at the department of Economics at the Goethe University since 1974 where he was also the Dean from 1981 to 1982. Since 1974, he has held many different visiting professorships: Nice 1977, 1993; Toulouse 1992, 1993; New School for Social Research New York 1984; Rome 1985; Venice 1990; and later he visited east Asia quite often. For 10 years (1981-1990) he taught different courses at the Center of Advanced Economic Studies in Triest. In 2004, he received an honorary doctoral degree from the law department of the University of Tübingen, and later in 2005, he received the honorary doctoral degree of University of Macerata in Italy. On 14 December 2010, the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev awarded him with the Thomas Guggenheim Prize in the History of Economics. Currently he is a Senior Professor at the Goethe University. Furthermore, he is an honorary member of the Stefan-George-Gesellschaft. In 2019, as a specially invited visiting scholar, Schefold went to Peking University,China. During staying in China for two months, Schefold made several speeches in Peking University, Tsinghua University and Fudan University, etc.
Since obtaining a chair at the Goethe University, Schefold has continued his work on capital theory, relating it to the classical and to the neoclassical tradition in the history of economic thought. His recent theoretical work has led to a profound modification of the so-called Cambridge debate on capital. By introducing random matrices, he was able to derive the (restrictive) conditions under which such old problems as the construction of an aggregate production function or the Marxian transformation problem can be solved rigorously.
Engagement
Schefold achieved national fame with his work on energy scenarios for Germany in the 1980s and 90s, mainly in collaboration with the philosopher Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich and the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. The book Die Grenzen der Atomwirtschaft, jointly with Meyer-Abich, became a bestseller (1986) and contributed to the end of the development of the breeder technology and of reprocessing in Germany. It advocated the continued use of light water reactors for a limited period of time and helped to convince the public of the need to foster the saving of energy and the development of regenerative sources on the basis of detailed prior studies of their technical and economic feasibility.