Fritz Machlup
Fritz Machlup ( until 1940: Machlup - Wolf, * December 15, 1902 in Wiener Neustadt, † January 30, 1983 in Princeton, New Jersey) was an Austrian-American economist. He was one of the first economists, the theory described the importance of knowledge as an economic resource.
Life
Fritz Machlup was born in 1902 the son of a cardboard factory. From 1920 he studied, among others Friedrich von Wieser and Ludwig von Mises at the University of Vienna economy. As early as 1923 he received his doctorate due to currency theoretical study of the gold. Machlup was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1933 for the U.S. and in 1935 a professorship at the University of Buffalo on. After the annexation of Austria by the German Reich in 1940, he took the U.S. citizenship.
He taught at the University of Buffalo ( 1935-47 ), the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore ( 1947-59 ) and Princeton University ( 1960-83 ).
His main work is considered the book in 1962, published The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. With his theories of knowledge as an economic resource and its analytical investigation of structures for knowledge sharing, he was instrumental in the development of information economics. He helped much to popularize the concept of the information society.
Machlup also presented an extensive study of the question of whether it makes sense from an economic point of view, to protect inventions by patents.