Robert Heilbroner

Robert Heilbroner (March 24, 1919 – January 4, 2005) was an American economist. The author of some twenty books, Heilbroner was best known for The Worldly Philosophers (1953), a survey of the lives and contributions of famous economists, notably Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.

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Heilbroner grew up in New York, and graduated from Harvard University in 1940 with a summa cum laude degree in philosophy, government and economics. During World War II, he served in the United States Army and worked at the Office of Price Control under John Kenneth Galbraith, the highly celebrated and controversial Institutionalist economist. After the war, Heilbroner worked briefly as a banker and entered into the academia in the 1950s as a research fellow at the New School for Social Research. During this period, he was highly influenced by the German economist Adolf Lowe who was a foremost representative of the German Historical School.

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In 1963, Heilbroner earned a Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research, where he was subsequently appointed Norman Thomas Professor of Economics in 1971 and remained for some fifty years.

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Although a highly unconventional economist, who regards himself more of a social theorist and "worldly philosopher" (philosopher pre-occupied with "worldly" affairs, such as economic structures), and who tends to integrate the disciplines of history, economics and philosophy, Heilbroner was nevertheless recognized by his peer as a prominent economist. He was elected Vice President of the American Economic Association in 1972.

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Written in 1953, Worldly Philosophers has sold nearly four million copies -- the second-best-selling economics text of all time (the first being Paul Samuelson's "Economics," a highly popular university textbook.) The seventh edition of the book, published in 1999, included a new final chapter entitled "The End of Worldly Philosophy", which included both a grim view on the current state of economics as well as a hopeful vision for a "reborn worldly philosophy" that incorporated social aspects of capitalism.

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He also came up with a way of classifying economies, as either Traditional (primarily agriculturally-based, "primitive"), Command (centrally planned economy, often involving the state), Market (free market capitalism), or Mixed (a mixture of the previous three).

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March 24: March 24 is the 83rd day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (84th in Leap years). There are 282 days remaining....

1919: 1919 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar)....

January 4: January 4 is the 4th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. 361 days (362 in leap years) remain in the year after this day...

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