Hirschman, Albert O.

Hirschman, Albert O. (Otto) (1915–  ) political economist; born in Berlin, Germany. He studied in Paris, London, and Trieste before coming to the University of California: Berkeley in 1941. He served in the U.S. Army (1943–45) and worked as an economist with the Federal Reserve Board (1946–52). He taught at Yale, Harvard, and Columbia Universities before joining the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. (1974–85). He advised the government of Columbia (1952–56). In The Strategy of Economic Development (1958, later revised) and other works, he rejected a "balanced growth" strategy for Third World countries, proposing instead a new model of economic planning—illustrated in his various studies of Latin American nations—that became internationally influential.