Part I: the Early Years (1910–47)
Notes Part I: The Early Years (1910–47) 1. When searching for clues in Hans Singer’s formative years for early influences that were to fashion his outlook on life and determine his future work, we are fortunate to have a number of autobiographical accounts, which leaves little to surmise or conjecture (Singer, 1976a; 1984c; 1986g; 1992d; Arestis and Sawyer, 1992; Esslinger, 1997). 2. Original version published in 1912; revised edition in1926. Shortened and revised edition translated into English by Redvers Opie in 1934. For an appreciation of the life and work of Schumpeter, see Marz, 1991; Swedberg, 1991; and Stolper, 1994; 3. Wolfgang Stolper, Schumpeter’s biographer, described perhaps the most important messages of Schumpeter’s Theory of Economic Development as ‘History matters. Theory matters. Evolution, not equilibrium, is the central phenomenon. The future is in principle not foreseeable. Theoretical expla- nations are rational but not deterministic. Extrapolation of the past to the future may work for a time but may then suddenly become misleading’ (Stolper, in Sapsford and Chen, 1998a, p. 521). 4. It has also helped many friends and colleagues who have sent their drafts to Singer for comment and found that nothing escaped his attention, includ- ing omitted punctuation marks and spelling mistakes. 5. Singer acknowledged that Loesch’s work provided the main inspiration for one of his earliest papers, which he wrote with Abba Lerner in 1937 (Lerner and Singer, 1937a). A year earlier, he had also written a paper on the possibil- ity of a mathematical generalization of the relative numbers of towns and villages of different size first discovered by Auerbach in 1913, which he ‘redis- covered’ using more extensive data (Singer, 1936a).
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