RARE \"Polish Economist\" Oskar R. Lange Signed 3X5 Card For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "Polish Economist" Oskar R. Lange Hand Signed 3X5 Card Dated 1964. 

ES-2432

Oskar

Ryszard Lange (27 July 1904 – 2

October 1965) was a Polish economist and diplomat. He is best known for advocating

the use of market pricing tools in socialist systems

and providing a model of market

socialism. He responded to the economic calculation problem proposed by Ludwig claiming that managers in be able to monitor supply and

demand through increases and declines in inventories of

goods, and advocated the nationalization of

major industries. During his stay in the United

States, Lange was an academic teacher and researcher in mathematical economics. Later in socialist Poland, he was a member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party. Lange was born in Tomaszów Mazowiecki as son of Julius Lange and his wife Sophie Albertine Rosner. His ancestors had

emigrated at the beginning of the 19th century from Germany to Poland.[6] He of Kraków, where he defended a doctoral

dissertation in 1928 under Adam Krzyżanowski. From 1926 to 1927

Lange worked at the Ministry of Labor in Warsaw,

and then was a research assistant at the University of Kraków (1927–31). He

married Irene Oderfeld in 1932. In 1934, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship brought him to England,

from where he emigrated to the United

States in 1937. Lange became a professor at the University of Chicago in 1938 and was naturalized as

a U.S. citizen in 1943.

Joseph Stalin, who identified Lange as a person of leftist and

pro-Soviet sympathies, prevailed on President Franklin D. Roosevelt to obtain a passport for Lange to

visit the Soviet Union in an official capacity, so that Stalin

could speak with him personally; he also proposed offering him a position in

the future Polish cabinet. The State Department was opposed to Lange traveling as an

emissary because they felt that his political views represented neither

Americans of Polish descent nor American public opinion in general. Lange's

trip to the Soviet Union in 1944 caused further controversy, as the

newly-establish Polish American Congress condemned him and defended the

interests of the London-based Polish government-in-exile. Lange returned to the United

States at the end of May and met, at Roosevelt's request, with Prime

Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk of the government-in-exile, who was

on a visit in Washington. Lange stressed how reasonable Stalin was prepared

to be (Stalin told him of the Soviet desire to preserve independent Poland

under a coalition government), and asked the State Department to put pressure

on the exiled Polish leadership to reach an understanding with the Soviet

leader.

Towards the end of World War II,

Lange broke with the Polish government-in-exile and transferred his support to

the Lublin Committee (PKWN) sponsored by the Soviet Union.

Lange served as a go-between for Roosevelt and Stalin during on post-war Poland. After the war ended

in 1945, Lange returned to Poland. He then renounced his American citizenship and went back to the

US in the same year as the Polish People's Republic's first ambassador to the United

States. In 1946, Lange also served as Poland's delegate to the United Nations Security Council. From 1947 he lived in Poland.

Oskar Lange worked for the Polish government while continuing his academic

pursuits at the University of Warsaw and the Main School of Planning and Statistics. He was deputy chairman

of the Polish Council of State in 1961–65, and as such one of

four acting chairmen of the Council of State (a head of

state function). The bulk of Lange's contributions to economics

came during his American interlude of 1933–45. Despite being an ardent socialist,

Lange deplored the Marxian labor theory of value because he was very much a believer

in the neoclassical theory of price. In the history of

economics, he is probably best known for his work On the Economic

Theory of Socialism published in 1936, where he famously economics together. In the book, Lange

advocated the use of market tools

(especially the neoclassical pricing theory) in economic planning of socialism

and Marxism. He proposed that central planning boards set prices

through "trial and error", making adjustments as shortages and

surpluses occur rather than relying on a free price mechanism. Under this

system, central planners would arbitrarily pick a price for products manufactured

in government factories and raise it or reduce, depending on whether it

resulted in shortages or gluts. After this economic experiment had been run a

few times, mathematical methods would be employed to plan the economy: if there

were shortages, prices would be raised; if there were surpluses, prices would

be lowered. Raising the prices would encourage businesses

to increase production, driven by their desire to increase profits, and in

doing so eliminate the shortage. Lowering the prices would encourage businesses

to curtail production in order to prevent losses, which would eliminate the

surplus. In Lange's opinion, such simulation of

market mechanism would be capable of effectively managing supply and

demand. Proponents of this idea argued that it combines the

advantages of a market economy with those of socialist economy. With the utilization of this idea, Lange

claimed, a state-run economy would be at least as efficient as a

capitalist or private market economy. He argued that this was possible,

provided the government planners used the price system as if in a market

economy and instructed state industry managers to respond parametrically to

state-determined prices (minimize cost, etc.). Lange's argument was one of the

pivots of the socialist calculation debate with the Austrian

School economists. At that time, the view among English

socialists of the Fabian Society was that Lange had won the debate. His works provided the earliest model of market

socialism. Lange

also made contributions in various other areas. He was one of the leading

lights of the "Paretian Revival" in general equilibrium theory during the 1930s. In 1942, he

provided one of the first proofs of the First and Second Welfare Theorems. He initiated the analysis

of stability of general equilibrium (1942, 1944). His critique of the quantity theory of money (1942) prompted his

student Don Patinkin to develop his of money into general equilibrium theory. Lange made

several seminal contributions to the development of neoclassical synthesis (1938, 1943, 1944). He worked on

integrating classical economics and neoclassical economics into a

single theoretical structure (e.g. 1959). In his final years, Lange also worked

on cybernetics and the use of computers for economic

planning. The International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) awarded

Oskar Lange an honorary fellowship in 1962.