Albert Otto Hirschman (7 April 1915-10 December 2012) was a German-American political economist. Born in Berlin to a Jewish family, he emigrated to Paris amid the rise of Nazism in Germany, and he served in the International Brigades for three months during the Spanish Civil War and helped many of Europe's leading artists and intellectuals escape from France to the United States during World War II. Hirschman served as a Rockefeller Fellow at UC Berkeley from 1941 to 1943, as a US Army OSS interpreter from 1943 to 1946, on the Federal Reserve Board from 1946 to 1952, on the National Planning Board of Colombia from 1952 to 1954, a private economic counselor in Bogota from 1954 to 1956, as a professor at Yale University from 1956 to 1958, at Columbia University from 1958 to 1964, and at Harvard University from 1964 to 1974, and at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1974 until his death in 2012.
Hirschman supported unbalanced growth as a means to stimulate growth and mobilize resources; argued in his 1970 work Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that the only responses to declining firms or polities would be to quit, speak up, or stay quiet; and argued that capitalistic avarice was embraced by Enlightenment-era thinkers as a counterweight to humankind's destructive passions.