Carl Christian von Weizsäcker Author

Carl Christian von Weizsäcker received his PhD in 1961 from the University of Basel for a dissertation in which he showed that the optimal rate of interest is equal to the growth rate. Edmund Phelps published the same result also in 1961 and called it the “Golden Rule of Accumulation.” Following research visits at MIT and the University of Cambridge, he became full professor of economics in Heidelberg at the age of 27. From 1968 to 1970, he taught as a full professor at the Economics Department of MIT. His students included Robert Merton, Robert Shiller and Stanley Fischer. During these years, he co-authored papers with Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow in the field of capital theory and macroeconomics. Later, Carl Christian von Weizsäcker turned to microeconomic topics: in particular, topics in industrial economics, the economics of telecommunications and energy economics. He developed a theory of adaptive preferences that can serve as a basis for welfare economics beyond the homo economicus. He taught at the universities of Bielefeld, Bonn, Bern and Cologne. Since his retirement from teaching, he has been working at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Public Goods, Bonn (Germany).

In 1977, he was elected to the Board of Academic Advisors of the German Minister for Economic Affairs, of which he is still a member today. From 1986 to 1998, he was a member of Germany’s Monopolies Commission, and from 1989 to 1998, he was its chair. Since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, he has principally focused on macroeconomics and capital theory. The present book developed out of his research in these areas.

Carl Christian von Weizsäcker is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Freiburg, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, and Germany’s National Academy of Science and Engineering. 

Hagen M. Krämer is Professor of Economics at the Department of Management Sciences and Engineering of the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences in Germany. He studied economics at the University of Bremen and the New School for Social Research (New York). After completing a first degree in economics, he worked for five years as a research assistant at the IKSF, an economics research institute at the University of Bremen, where he received his doctorate in 1995 for a dissertation on income distribution and technical progress. He then worked for six years as an economist at a leading German automotive company in Stuttgart and Berlin.

Hagen Krämer has been a visiting scholar or visiting professor at several institutes and universities, including The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW-Berlin), the Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK-Düsseldorf), the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI-Karlsruhe), the University of Graz (Austria), and the New School for Social Research (New York).

He is a founding member of the German Keynes Society, a member of the Council of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought, of the Scottish Economic Society and of the German Association for Political Economy. He serves as an elected member of both the Committee for the History of Economic Thought and the Committee for Economic Policy of the German Economic Association, the Verein für Socialpolitik. His preferred areas of research are income distribution, macro­economics, the economics of the service sector, and the history of economic thought.