Overview Machlup Shannon Pool Weber Veblen McLuhan

Fritz Machlup Machlup's one of the fathers of thinking about the information society and the information economy.  While he had a distinguished career as an academic economist, writing on subjects as diverse as international currency reform and managerialism, for us he's interesting for pioneering efforts to map the shape and impact of information production in an industrial economy. Researchers such as Lyman & Varian, for example, build on his studies.      life  Fritz Machlup  was born in Wiener Neustadt (Austria) on 15 December 1902, the son of a minor industrialist. After studying at the University of Vienna under  Ludwig von Mises his dissertation on the gold standard - Die Goldkernwahrung - was published in 1925.  By that time he'd expanded his father's holdings, becoming a partner in cardboard-manufacturing companies in Austria and Hungary. He became a member of the Austrian cardboard cartel in 1927, retaining his academic links by serving as  treasurer (later secretary) of the Austrian Economic Society and participating in von Mises's Geistkreis seminars. He wrote widely on economic liberalisation, on war reparations payments, and on the stock market and capital formation. In 1933 Machlup left Austria, travelling to Columbia, Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford as a Rockerfeller Fellow. He held a professorship at the University of Buffalo from 1935 to 1947, with visiting positions at Cornell, Northwestern, Berkeley, Michigan, Harvard and Stanford.  During the war he served as Special Consultant to the Post War Labor Problems Division of the federal Department of Labor and in the Office of Alien Property. As a monetary supply and foreign exchange theorist he published extensively, gaining recognition as a critic of John Maynard Keynes.  Machlup became professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University in 1947, writing influential books on pricing and industrial organization. He was visiting professor at Columbia University (1948), UCLA (1949), Kyoto and Doshisha Universities of Japan (1955), and a Ford Foundation Research fellow (1957-58). He served as Walker Professor of International Finance and director of the International Finance Section at Princeton University from 1960 to 1971.  During that period he was a visiting professor at City University of New York, New York University, Osaka and  Melbourne. Machlup was a consultant to the US Treasury from 1965 to 1977, having formed the Bellagio Group of academics to study international monetary problems in 1963.  His investigations of innovation and knowledge beginning in 1950 lead to major studies on Information Through The Printed Word: The Dissemination of Scholarly, Scientific & Intellectual Knowledge and Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution & Economic Significance, three volumes of a projected ten volume series. Machlup  coauthored Optimum Social Welfare & Productivity with Jan Tinbergen, Abram Bergson & Oskar Morgenstern in 1972. In conjunction with work on the international monetary system and the economics of knowledge, he published A History of Thought on Economic Integration (77) and Methodology of Economics & Other Social Sciences (78).  Machlup died on 30 January 1983 in Princeton, New Jersey shortly after finishing the third volume of Knowledge.      biographies  There's a concise biography in Breadth & Depth in Economics: Fritz Machlup: The Man & His Ideas, edited by Jacob Dreyer (78).  A bibliography of his work is contained in the Selected Economic Writings of Fritz Machlup edited by George Bitros (76).       writings  Machlup's early work on the language of economics is collected in Essays in Economic Semantics (63, 67, 75).  His most important papers include 'The Commonsense of the Elasticity of Substitution' in Review of Economic Studies 2 (1935), 'The Theory of Foreign Exchanges' in Economica (39 & 40); 'Elasticity Pessimism in International Trade' in Economia Internazionale (50), 'Concepts of Competition & Monopoly' in American Economic Review (55), 'The Problem of Verification in Economics' in Southern Economic Journal (55), 'Relative Prices & Aggregate Spending in the Analysis of Devaluation' in American Economic Review (55) and 'Theories of the Firm: Marginalist, Managerial, Behavioral' in American Economic Review (67). Information related publications include The Economic Review of the Patent System (58), The Production & Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (62) and the three volume Information through the Printed Word: The Dissemination of Scholarly, Scientific & Intellectual Knowledge (78).  At the time of his death he'd written the first three volumes of  Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution & Economic Significance (80-83). He also co-edited The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages with Una Mansfield and wrote Education & Economic Growth (70).