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Werner Hirsch

IN MEMORIAM

Werner Hirsch
Professor of Economics Emeritus
UC Los Angeles
1920 – 2009

 

Professor-Emeritus Werner Z. Hirsch, an eminent scholar of public finance, governmental operations, and the interrelation of law and economics, died on July 10, 2009. He joined the UCLA Economics Department faculty in 1963 and retired in 1990, although he continued to teach and publish after his retirement. Early in his UCLA career, Prof. Hirsch was the founder of the UCLA Institute of Government and Public Affairs.

 

Prior to coming to UCLA, Professor Hirsch was an instructor at UC-Berkeley (1949-51), a researcher at the United Nations and the Brookings Institution (1951-52 and 1952-53, respectively), and a ladder faculty member of Washington University (1953-63). He received his undergraduate degree from UC-Berkeley in 1947 and his PhD in economics from UC-Berkeley in 1949, an obviously accelerated education.

 

Consultative and Professional Activity

Apart from his principal faculty and research positions, during his career Professor Hirsch consulted with various congressional and California legislative committees, government agencies including the Internal Revenue Service and NASA, and state and local government entities and officials. His university curriculum vitae – which was not updated after 1987 or after his retirement in 1990 - lists over 220 publications. These items include journal articles, books, chapters, conference proceedings, book reviews, popular articles, and op eds covering regional economics, government budgeting, the economics of education, rural and urban economic development, racial labor market outcomes, antitrust issues, the space program, product marketing, cost-benefit analysis, local use of input-output analysis, crime control, zoning, housing, and public-sector wage determination and human resource management, among other topics.

 

Service to the Academic Senate and the Field of Education

Professor Hirsch was an active member of the Academic Senate at the campus and systemwide levels, particularly in the area of faculty welfare. Especially after his retirement, and drawing on his experience in interacting with the Senate and with UC and UCLA administrators, he developed a particular interest in the management and funding of institutions of higher education. Given the budgetary challenges facing UC and UCLA during the first decade of the 21st century, he became an advocate of the so-called “Michigan Model,” sometimes also termed the high tuition/high aid approach.

 

Nonacademic Activity

Apart from his teaching and research in economics, Professor Hirsch had an intense interest in art and interacted socially and professionally with many faculty members outside his academic sphere. His many campus and off-campus connections were evident at his memorial service at UCLA, held on September 21, 2009. Despite its timing, coming just before the beginning of fall quarter instruction, a large turnout of friends and colleagues attended and spoke.

 

More Detailed Life History

Professor Hirsch was born on June 10, 1920 in Linz am Rhein, Germany (not to be confused with Linz, Austria). His family had a retail store in the city. Due to the Nazi regime’s racial and anti-Semitic laws, he was forced out of the gymnasium (high school) he was attending in the mid-1930s without finishing his degree there. A Jewish organization advised his family to send their son to Haifa in what was then British Palestine, where an uncle had already migrated. Subsequently, his parents also immigrated to Palestine. Prof. Hirsch’s middle name, Zvi, was acquired during this period. Originally, he attended an agricultural trade school, taking courses in viticulture. Later, he switched to courses at Hebrew University where he met his future wife, Hilde Emma Zwiren, a student of botany. She acquired the name “Esther” at Hebrew University and was known by that name socially. Later, she became professionally known as Hilde E. Hirsch.

 

Emigrating to the U.S.

Werner and Esther left for study at UC-Berkeley in 1945 under the misconception that it was located in Los Angeles. However, they were soon redirected from LA to Berkeley. Because both had a mix of educational training that University officials at Berkeley could not interpret, they were admitted into courses conditionally and later received regular degrees. Werner’s PhD dissertation – “The Economics of Integration in Agricultural Marketing” – reflected his earlier training in agriculture. The dissertation focused on agricultural cooperatives and their operations and suggested conditions of efficient operation. It referenced various marketing cooperatives in California handling fruits, nuts, dairy products, and other farm produce. Some of his early publications were drawn from this line of research. However, he soon began a more general area of research into the efficient operation of nonfarm institutions such as schools and hospitals.

 

Plans to Return to Israel Upended

Both Werner and Esther expected to return to Israel after completion of their degrees at UC-Berkeley and in 1951 both in fact had offers of ladder faculty positions at Hebrew University. By that time, two of their three children were born. However, in traveling toward the East Coast and visiting relatives on their way to Israel, they learned that the cost of an apartment Hebrew University had made available for them was beyond their means and they changed plans. It was at this point that Werner acquired appointments at the United Nations and then Brookings. They subsequently moved to St. Louis where Werner was offered a ladder appointment at Washington University in the Economics Department.

 

While in St. Louis, their third child was born. Esther changed her field to neurobiology to accommodate a research appointment at Washington University. Professor Hirsch became director of an institute similar to the Institute of Government and Public Affairs that he was later to found at UCLA. Apart from his research output, he authored a textbook: Introduction to Modern Statistics (1957). Its final chapter alerts students to the oncoming use of computers in data processing and analysis and closes with a prediction that - with computers - statistics would be increasingly used in making public policy decisions.

 

Also while at Washington University, Professor Hirsch edited a book on Urban Life and Form (1963) which included chapters from prominent urbanists of the early 1960s. The topics included a history of the city in the U.S. and perspectives from a variety of disciplines including law, economics, urban planning, and political science. Professor Hirsch contributed a chapter dealing with fiscal policy and provision of public services. In it, among other recommendations aimed at the efficient delivery of such services, he suggested creation of regional compacts and entities that could bridge artificial jurisdictional boundaries and account for spillovers and common interests.

 

UCLA Career

After arriving at UCLA, Professor Hirsch continued his interests in regional policy, again with the notion of bridging interests that cross local borders. He edited a book on Regional Accounts for Policy Decisions (1966) which included a variety of chapters aimed at going beyond traditional public accounting to examine the costs and benefits of various public activities. For example, Professor Hirsch’s chapter used the example of a school district whose relevant data included not just the standard revenue and expenditures but also costs to other local authorities in providing security and costs to households in having their children attend school.

 

Professor Hirsch’s interest in schools was also reflected in his edited volume Inventing Education for the Future (1967). The book, the product of a symposium sponsored by the UCLA Institute of Government and Public Affairs which he founded and directed, brought together experts in educational innovation. As in the earlier statistics textbook, the possible impact of computers was discussed including the emerging possibility of automated instruction.

 

In the early 1970s, Professor Hirsch published The Economics of State and Local Government (1970), a sole-authored book that was part of a handbook series aimed at graduate students in various subfields of economics. That book was in many respects a predecessor of Urban Economic Analysis (1973), part of the same handbook series. The later book covered such areas as urban geography and land use, transportation, police and fire, recreation, and culture. It reviewed theories of economic development, urban labor market operation, and fiscal policy. And it provided a guide to data analysis and tools such as regional input-output analysis. At the time, unionization of public employees was expanding and Professor Hirsch examined the growth of various regulatory approaches to collective bargaining in government. Although largely written from an American perspective, the book was subsequently translated into Spanish for an international edition.

 

Professor Hirsch became increasingly interested in the intersection of law and economics and arranged to take courses informally in the UCLA law school. One product of this interest was publication of his book Law and Economics: An Introductory Analysis (1979). This book was updated an appeared in subsequent editions in the late 1980s and late 1990s. It covers issues of property rights, landlord-tenant relations, zoning, crime, antitrust, and other legal topics. However, the focus was on the degree to which legal regulation produced efficient outcomes. By the time of the third edition, topics such as age discrimination had also been added.

 

In the 1980s, Professor Hirsch wrote a more technical textbook on Urban Economics (1984) which reflected such emerging concerns as environmental policies. It also appeared in both an American and an international edition. The book reflected some of the efforts at controlled social experiments that had occurred in the 1970s and afterwards, in part motivated by concerns over poverty. Professor Hirsch had, in fact, co-authored a book (with Robert Ferber of the University of Illinois) on Social Experimentation and Economic Policy (1982) which analyzed such experimentation. Apart from the experiments that dealt with income distribution and labor force participation, the book looked at approaches to variable electricity pricing and expansion of health insurance coverage.

 

Retirement and Final Years

After retirement, Professor Hirsch continued to publish. He co-authored Public Finance and Expenditure in a Federal System (1990) with Anthony Rufulo, a former UCLA doctoral student. The book analyzed various forms of taxation, government borrowing, and budgetary concepts such as cash vs. accrual accounting. It also focused on fiscal crises that might affect state and local governments and the possible role of the federal government in mitigating such events.

 

During the 1990s and up until his death, Professor Hirsch continued to write essays on the issues that had intrigued him over his career, including the emerging budget distress that was afflicting California. He also remained an active member of the Academic Senate, especially in the area of faculty welfare. And he continued to interact with top officials of the University of California and other higher educational institutions in the pursuit of developing more effective approaches to university administration.

 

Werner Z. Hirsch in many respects represented a type of academic now rare in the university world. He had a basic discipline – economics – but felt a need to interact with scholars in other disciplines to develop an understanding of his research targets. University administrators sometimes bemoan the lack of interdisciplinary research and teaching. In Professor Hirsch, they had someone who met that need admirably.

Professor Hirsch is survived by his wife, the retired research neurologist Hilde E. Hirsch, sons Daniel and Joel, and daughter Ilona.

 

Daniel J.B. Mitchell, Professor-Emeritus, September 25, 2010.