Fritz Machlup

"Fritz Machlup was a University of Vienna educated economist. While he completed his dissertation under Ludwig von Mises, his teacher (indeed Mises’ teacher as well as Bohm Bawerk’s and Schumpeter’s) was Friedrich von Wieser...

"Machlup’s cross-functional, cross-geographic external organization supported the strategy he proposed for the investigation of strategic options. For the Bellagio Group conferences, he chose academic economists who were associated in print with a specific exchange rate policy, most of whom had had prior public policy experience and all of whom were members of Group of Ten countries, mirroring the influential members of the IMF working on balance of payments problems. He also built close relationships with the ultimate decisionmakers, the chairman of the Group of Ten, Otmar Emminger; chairman of Working Party 3 of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Emile de Lennep; and chairman of the Ossola Committee on the Creation of Reserve Assets, Rinaldo Ossola. The chair and deputies of the Group of Ten would join the academics of the Bellagio Group 19 times through 1977. Just as Machlup had invited Robert Triffin and William Fellner to be co-leaders of the first four Bellagio Group conferences, he continued to extend invitations to academics and former policy-makers (like C. Fred Bergsten of the National Security Council and Robert Roosa, undersecretary of the Treasury for monetary affairs) including those with very different policy prescriptions from hisown, to be co-leaders of future Bellagio and later Burgenstock conferences, extending the policy and intellectual reach of the conferences but, as importantly, ensuring that policy rivals had the opportunity to put their arguments through the same rigorous framing and methodological analysis to determine impact on payments adjustment, liquidity and confidence."

Articles

 * Carol M. Connell, "Fritz Machlup and the Bellagio Group: Strategy and Organization in an Early NGO", Brooklyn College - Finance and Business Management, October 30, 2011.

Related Sourcewatch

 * Ludwig von Mises Institute
 * Group of 30