Biography[edit]

He was born in Vienna.^[1] In 1934, after the Austrian Civil War, his family emigrated to Britain.^[2] Hirsch graduated with first class honours^[3] from the London School of Economics in 1952 before working as a financial journalist on The Banker and The Economist (financial editor, 1963–1966). He was a senior adviser to the International Monetary Fund,^[4] from 1966 to 1972 where he worked on international monetary problems.


Afterwards he spent two years as a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1972 to 1974, where he started working on his book The Social Limits to Growth (RKP, 1977), having previously written The Pound Sterling: A Polemic (V Gollancz, 1965), Money International (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1967), and Newspaper Money: Fleet Street and the search for the affluent reader (with David Gordon) (Hutchinson, 1975) . In 1975 he joined the University of Warwick as Professor of International Studies. A year later he developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis leading to his death on January 10, 1978.