Value, Growth and Economic Policy:
Essays in Tribute to Adolph Lowe
Volume 50 No. 2 (Summer 1983)
Arien Mack, Editor
Edward Nell, Guest Editor


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Adolph Lowe at Ninety

Adolph Lowe's work has not only been truly interdisciplinary, but also within economics he weaves together several major and usually divergent strands of thought.  The interdisciplinary aspect of his work arises from his historical and philosophical argument that economics cannot be isolated from politics--indeed, economic theory cannot be adequately conceptualized except as Political Economics.  For while poverty and "free" markets--harsh competition--rendered economic variables largely predictable in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, affluence, labor unions, and the development of administered pricing have produced many kinds of discretionary opportunities, at least for large firms, well-to-do households, and strong unions, with the result that economic outcomes are frequently no longer automatic or predictable.  As a result, the outcomes must be determined by the decisions and actions of the government.  Economics is not a closed discipline because economic models on their own are indeterminate--the position and the movement of the economy depend on political decisions and the intervention of the government.

This is only a sketch of the highlights of a complex and far-reaching argument, but it is enough to indicate how deeply interdisciplinary it is.  Yet the case is even more complex, for Lowe's work in technical economics lies largely outside the U.S. "mainstream" school.  The models which, according to his argument, twentieth-century capitalist development has "opened," rendered indeterminate, are based more on Ricardo and Marx than on Marshall and Walras.  His monumental Path of Economic Growth substantially extends this tradition, and is one of the few major works on the theory of growth which explicitly discards the equilibrium framework of steady growth.  Indeed, one major point of his work is to show that the market cannot adequately handle "traverses"--movements from one path of growth to another.  These must therefore become the subject of planning, and the desirability of one growth path over another must be decided politically.

Lowe developed his approach first at Kiel and then at Frankfurt.  But in 1933 his career was abruptly cut short, and he did not find a congenial home again until he arrived at the New School in 1940.  For over forty years he taught and developed his ideas here and now has returned to Germany.  We shall miss him, but we will not lose contact.  For in the meantime there has arisen a new generation of German scholars who have revived the tradition in which Lowe was the leading figure in Weimar.  To perpetuate and develop this tradition, and to honor Adolph Lowe, the University of Bremen and the New School for Social Research have joined forces to create the Adolph Lowe Institute of Economic Research.

Edward Nell
Guest Editor

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