He argued that disequilibria should be encouraged to stimulate growth and help mobilize resources, because developing countries are short of decision-making skills.

The first describes the three basic possible responses to decline in firms or polities (quitting, speaking up, staying quiet) in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970).

[5][6] This experience helped him when, after France’s 1940 surrender to the Nazis during World War II, he worked with Varian Fry from the Emergency Rescue Committee to help many of Europe's leading artists and intellectuals escape from occupied France to Spain through paths in the Pyrenees Mountains and then to Portugal,[5][8] with their exodus to end in the United States.

[8] Hirschman's participation in these rescues is one aspect of the 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic, in which a fictionalized version of him is played by Lucas Englander.

[12] From 1952 to 1954 he was a financial advisor to the National Planning Board of Colombia; he stayed in Bogotá for another 2 years and worked as a private economic counselor.

He argued that disequilibria should be encouraged to stimulate growth and help mobilize resources, because developing countries are short of decision-making skills.

[14] In the 1960s, Hirschman praised the works of Peruvian intellectuals José Carlos Mariátegui and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, stating "paradoxically, the most ambitious attempt to theorize the revolution of Latin American society arose in a country that to date has experienced very little social change: I am talking about Peru and the writings of Haya de la Torre and Mariátegui".

In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) he described the three basic possible responses to decline in firms or polities (quitting, speaking up, staying quiet).

He describes how thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries embraced the sin of avarice as an important counterweight to humankind's destructive passions.

Capitalism was promoted by thinkers including Montesquieu, Sir James Steuart, and Adam Smith as repressing the passions for "harmless" commercial activities.