Social Limits to Growth

A sleeper hit of economics! Its brilliant insights have become ever more relevant as liberal capitalism confronts challenges from austerity to the global race for resources. A book whose message is more urgent now than on its publication nearly 50 years ago. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Daniel Halliday.

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.