From Probable to Possible

One such figure was Albert O Hirschman, a German-born émigré to the United States who from 1946 had worked as an economist with the Federal Reserve Board on problems of economic reconstruction and cooperation in western Europe. In 1952, Hirschman moved to Colombia on a World Bank assignment to assist the country’s National Planning Council to implement development policies. The book that distilled that experience, The Strategy of Economic Development (1958), was immediately recognised as one of the most important contributions to development economics, and it made Hirschman famous as a pioneer of the discipline (as well as earning him tenure at Columbia University).