ÉMIGRÉ ECONOMISTS IN AMERICA: THEIR IMPACT AND THEIR EXPERIENCES

Abstract

I first visited the United States in September 1980 when I spent two weeks at the New School for Social Research in New York. The main reason was the first personal meeting with Adolph Lowe (1893–1995), with whom I had been in close contact since spring 1977 when I got my PhD in economics from the University of Kiel. Lowe had built up a new department for research on business cycles and international statistical economics at the Kiel Institute of World Economics since April 1926, which soon acquired an international reputation (Hagemann 2021). The group included such outstanding economists as Gerhard Colm, Hans Neisser, Fritz (Frank) Burchardt, and for some years also Wassily Leontief and Jacob Marschak. None of them remained in Germany after the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. Lowe had moved to the Goethe University in Frankfurt in October 1931, where he was dismissed after three semesters. Like many other émigré economists, he first went to Great Britain (Hagemann 2007), where he became an honorary lecturer in economics and political philosophy at the University of Manchester. In summer 1940 he moved further to New York where the Graduate Faculty of the New School had been founded as the “University in Exile” by Alvin Johnson, and Emil Lederer became the founding dean in 1933.1 Thus, in contrast to Colm, Lowe, as well as his lifelong friend Marschak (both were supervisors of Franco Modigliani’s New School PhD thesis) and Neisser were not members of the Mayflower generation.