Karl Pribram

Karl Eman Pribram was born on 2 December 1877 in Prague, the son of the jurist and insurance-company president Otto Pribram and his wife Leonore, née Popper, into a well-known German-Bohemian Jewish family; he later converted to Catholicism. After studying law at the German Charles University, he received his doctorate there in 1900. Periods of training in Berlin and Vienna followed, and in 1907 he qualified as a university lecturer in Vienna with the two-volume "Geschichte der österreichischen Gewerbepolitik von 1740 bis 1860" (History of Austrian Trade Policy from 1740 to 1860). From 1907 to 1914 Pribram taught as a Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) at the University of Vienna, and from 1914 as an associate professor. At the same time, from 1909 to 1921, he was secretary and secretary-general of the Central Office for Housing Reform; from 1918 to 1921, as head of section, he led the Department of Social Legislation in the Austrian Ministry of Social Affairs and helped shape the eight-hour day, unemployment insurance, and the Works Councils Act of the young republic. In 1921 he moved to the International Labour Office (ILO) in Geneva as head of the statistics and research division, where he shaped international labour statistics and questions of social insurance. In 1928 he accepted a call to the Frankfurt chair of economics and at the same time took over the directorship of the economics institute. In 1933 he was dismissed as "non-Aryan" and emigrated at the end of the year via Mexico to the United States. There he worked as a research member of the Brookings Institution (1934 to 1936), at the US Social Security Board (1936 to 1942), and as senior economist of the US Tariff Commission (1942 to 1951); from 1939 to 1952 he taught in parallel at the American University in Washington. Intellectually, Pribram combined the methodological tools of the Austrian School (Menger, Wieser, Böhm-Bawerk) with elements of the German Historical School and an empirical, statistically based approach to social research. His lifelong interest lay in the philosophical presuppositions underlying the formation of economic theory. In "Conflicting Patterns of Thought" (1949) and in "A History of Economic Reasoning", published posthumously in 1983, he traced four competing patterns of economic thought, whose roots he followed back to the medieval dispute over universals. Karl Pribram was the uncle of the neuroscientist Karl H. Pribram (1919–2015); he died on 15 July 1973 in Washington, D.C.