Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition Daniel Halliday
Preface
1. Introduction: The Argument in Brief
Part 1: The Neglected Realm of Social Scarcity
2. A Duality in the Growth Potential
3. The Material Economy and the Positional Economy
4. The Ambiguity of Economic Output
Part 2: The Commercialization Bias
5. The Economics of Bad Neighbors
6. The New Commodity Fetishism
Appendix. The Commercialization Effect: The Sexual Illustration
7. A First Summary: The Hole in the Affluent Society
Part 3: The Depleting Moral Legacy
8. An Overload on the Mixed Economy
9. Political Keynesianism and the Managed Market
10. The Moral Re-entry
11. The Lost Legitimacy and the Distributional Compulsion
Part 4: Perspective and Conclusions
12. The Liberal Market as a Transition Case
13. Inferences for Policy.
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Fred Hirsch was an Austrian-born British economist and Professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick. Born in Vienna in 1934, after the Austrian Civil War, his family emigrated to Britain. Hirsch graduated at the London School of Economics in 1952 before working as a financial journalist on The Banker and The Economist, where he was financial editor from 1963–1966. He was a senior adviser to the International Monetary Fund from 1966 to 1972, before becoming a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1972 to 1974. Already the author of several books, it was here that he started work on his best-known work, Social Limits to Growth (RKP, 1977). In 1975 he joined the University of Warwick as Professor of International Studies, where he worked until his death in 1978 at the age of forty-four.
'Important books are rare. They are all the more welcome when they appear; and one need have no hesitation in naming as a classic Fred Hirsch’s new analysis of the inherent defects of the market economy as an instrument of human amelioration.' - Peter Jay, The Times
'An exceptionally interesting, original, and well-written book on one of the most important themes: what are the fruits of economic growth and why do they seem increasingly disappointing?' - The Economic Journal
'This highly original book makes a compelling argument that affluence, by creating a kind of congestion (much more than simple crowding), limits the welfare attainable by society as a whole.' - Foreign Affairs
