Fred Hirsch (6 July 1931 – 10 January 1978) was an Austrian-born British economist and professor of international studies at the University of Warwick.
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) .
Hirsch's most influential book concerned the inherent limits to growth, including both the concept of positional goods and what he called the 'commercialisation effect'.
[5] The concept of positional goods helps explain why, as Hirsch told the New York Times, material growth can "no longer deliver what has long been promised for it - to make everyone middle-class".
[11] Michael J. Sandel has recently echoed Hirsch in challenging the belief that the commercialization process does not affect the product in question, highlighting the importance of what Hirsch called[12] "the effect on the characteristics of a product or activity of supplying it exclusively or predominantly on commercial terms rather than on some other basis – such as informal exchange, mutual obligation, altruism or love, or feelings of service or obligation"