Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

by Jeremy Adelman

  If he could not create a system and had no inkling how to devise an alternative master plan to solve Colombia’s problems, he at least wanted to solve some problems. So, he launched a consulting business that would build on the knowledge he had acquired working for the council but that would give him the autonomy from bosses and plans. The decision was an instant success, so much so that Albert had to opt out of a Caribbean vacation with Sarah and the girls. “People here are very impatient and very impulsive—they want his ‘economic’ advice now,” Sarah grumbled.29 When times got especially busy, Sarah pitched in, typing reports on the problem of sewers in Cali, taking phone calls, and gathering data to submit loan applications for municipal utilities. Eventually, Albert teamed up with a colleague also sent by the World Bank to work in the council, George Kalmanoff, whose contract ran out in November, to set up shop in their own offices. Hirschman had a plaque made up, “Albert Hirschman. Consultor Económico y Financiero,” which he hung proudly on the door of his small enterprise.

  The partnership thrived off contacts from the council; in some respects it created an opportunity to do what Hirschman thought the council should have been doing: identifying opportunities and spotlighting solutions on a level at which investors made decisions, but not from the perspective of a glassed office in a downtown building. The consultor’s first contracts were with private businesses and banks, such as the Caja de Crédito Agrario, which asked Hirschman to evaluate investment proposals. Some firms, such as Ebasco, a New York–based paper- and box maker interested in expanding to South America to set up a pulp and paper mill, hired Hirschman to evaluate the market. Hirschman and Kalmanoff pored over the data for Ebasco to profile a strong and expanding local demand and also noted the opportunity to converge with several local partners, such as the Institute for Industrial Promotion, as well as several firms such as Cartón de Colombia and Manuel Carvajal’s firm. “The creation in Colombia of such an enterprise,” he wrote of Ebasco’s venture, “is no doubt one of the most important next steps in the country’s rapidly advancing industrial development, and we hope our report will contribute to this end.” While the consultants had no doubt that they serviced their clients, they were not above smuggling in some ulterior, broader goals.30

  They took on more contracts with government agencies needing help with proposals for securing funds from the World Bank and other multilateral lenders. Project assessment soon became a staple of his consultancy. Little did he know that this evaluation business would become an instrument in Hirschman’s winding career in the social sciences for decades afterward. It also gave him an opportunity to study, and highlight, what was going right, not wrong, in Colombia. When the Central Bank asked him to write a pamphlet for investors, the result was “Colombia: Highlights of a Developing Economy,” a long booklet with the traits of Hirschman’s forgotten research proposal on cases of successful development. When José Castro Borrero, the manager of Cali’s Municipal Enterprises, contracted the consultors for a financial outlook for the municipality for five years, what he got what was a detailed, upbeat index of the ways in which the regional capital could solve its fiscal problems and promote opportunities for enterprise. Impossibility, futility, backwardness—the keywords of pessimism—were not part of Hirschman’s lexicon.31

  Teaming up with Kalmanoff functioned in part because they worked side by side rather than together. The growth of the development business meant plenty of suitors and lots of room for each consultant to do their own thing. Kalmanoff, younger and less worldly, had his own preferences and left Hirschman to focus on investment project analysis. The partnership was never more than a busy, well-positioned professional arrangement. The partners appeared to be happy. Hirschman’s list of contacts was widespread and countrywide and included the sugar planters of the Cauca Valley—Rafael Delgado Barreneche (a Conservative of some influence in the early 1950s) and Alberto Carvajal. The Cauca Valley projects would loom large in Hirschman’s later writings about Colombian development as a model of local entrepreneurship. He relished the opportunity and feeling of “entering more profoundly in the reality of the country and getting to know a great number of people.” Working closely with decision makers in a less paternalistic fashion also had its appeals. Hirschman enjoyed “finding it impossible to take an airplane without rushing to meet such and such a minister whom I knew personally. This was an agreeable and surprising experience for a young man like myself.”32

  And yet, there were signs of restlessness, possibly even fatigue, with the everyday work of consulting. Though he knew he was no system creator, he did yearn for more intellectually oriented opportunities; he not only wanted to help solve problems, he wanted to think about problem solving. When the assistant director for Social Sciences for the Rockefeller Foundation, Montague Yudelman, was visiting Bogotá in early 1956, he got the distinct impression that the team of Hirschman and Kalmanoff was a passing alliance. Each partner came to meet with Yudelman individually. Kalmanoff wanted to finish his PhD and write a dissertation based on some of his Colombian work. “He has strong personal reasons,” observed Yudelman, “for wishing to leave Bogotá.” Hirschman had something else in mind, but it, too, left the partner out. Ever since his waning days at the council, he had been thinking of a “Latin American Sample Survey Center.” He wrote to George Jaszi in early 1954 asking for advice and even prospective partners (“How about yourself?” he asked). But he had not given up hope; indeed, he had run a market study for a local gas utility and found the venture an intriguing one. After all, he thought, isn’t it important to know what people actually want from all this guff about development? His fantasies had even led him to think of relocating the family to Mexico City (an idea that Sarah cheered on as an exciting adventure; she clearly had gotten the bug for quests). Another idea was setting up a branch for the consulting firm in Caracas. Yudelman’s visit was the time to make the pitch for creating a consumer survey research center with links to the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, though neither appears to have been apprised of the idea. Yudelman told him that the foundation could not assist in profit-making ventures. “The matter was left at that. AH asked that this discussion be treated as confidential,” concluded Yudelman.33

  So it was that Albert Hirschman remained in Colombia and stuck to his consultancy. In the meantime, the Colombian years became more Colombian. His longest trip abroad was to Central America—where he traveled for six weeks from March to May 1955 at the behest of the Commerce Department to write “Guidebook for American Investors,” schmoozing his way through hotel lobbies, drinking cocktails with local businessmen and bankers in their suites, and sizing up the opportunities. But he did not just stick to the capitals. When he could, he carried his trademark to Central America and visited as many factories and housing projects as he could identify. In Nicaragua, the manager of the Banco Nicaraguense, Eduardo Montealegre, assumed the role of chaperone; he initially made a good impression. But that wore off as the trip wore on. He “has become far less sympathique to me,” complained Hirschman, but, he added tongue-in-cheek, he “is a great patriot. Everything is better here than in Guatemala, Salvador, Costa Rica, not to speak of poor Honduras.” Hirschman loved Guatemala, which reminded him of Switzerland, with the added anthropological appeal of Mayan villages.34

  Adjusting to Colombia took some time, especially for Sarah. The girls went to school at the Colegio Nueva Granada, not too far from home. Meanwhile, Sarah scrambled to learn Spanish. She also had to figure out how to govern a retinue of personal servants and maids—who tutored the Hirschmans in the art of making hot chocolate and melting panela. “The whole idea is revolting,” Sarah protested, though she was forced to concede that “it’s pleasant not to have to worry about dishes, cleaning and so on.”35

  At first, they rented a quiet but dark house from an Italian landlord on Calle 72. A year later, they moved to a house on Calle 74 nestled in the foothills of the l
ow mountains that hug the capital. Backed by tall eucalyptus trees and a stream, the monte was a beautiful setting at the (then) northern edge of the city, composed of modest single-family homes. Up the hills, poorer people built shacks of corrugated metal. The girls watched children who, instead of going to school, cleared the ground and broke rocks, and felt the urge to invite them to their yard to play with their toys and read their books, until Sarah and Albert dissuaded them on account of the lice, tuberculosis, and other potential trouble. Sarah realized they had arrived in a different world when she witnessed the daily ritual of her semirural neighborhood: around noon wives and daughters would emerge in long skirts and dark hats carrying stacked towers of portable metal containers full of hot food for the working men huddled in their ponchos on their lunch break. Sitting on the edge of the grass by the road, the women would serve meals to the menfolk. In the Hirschmans’ backyard, the maid raised chickens, which the girls liked to watch from the living room. It took some time to get used to the fact that the morning’s clucking fowl could wind up as evening’s dinner.36

  The house on Calle 74 became home. Albert set up a barbeque. Sarah furnished the house carefully, her eye peeled for old furniture and antiques, especially from crumbling colonial churches, procured in little shops in La Candelaria. There were also plenty of hammocks dangling from walls and trees.37

  It did not take long for the Hirschmans to develop a cosmopolitan circle of friends and acquaintances. In many ways, they acquired the social life they never had in the capital of the United States. Part of the ease was the scale: Bogotá was not a large, diverse, or impenetrable city. And, to a point, its cultural elite welcomed newcomers. El Tiempo’s political cartoonist, Peter Aldor, and his wife, Eva Aldor, Hungarian émigrés, were hosts of spirited soirées and meetings of Colombian and international artists, scientists, and writers. The bookstores, often owned by émigrés, served as literary hubs. The Librería Central in the center of the city, owned by the Austrian Hans Ungar, was a popular gathering point for writers and artists. Its selection of European and Latin American art books was an important magnet. Later Ungar expanded the store to include a small art gallery, on whose walls hung the work of a younger generation of painters like Juan Antonio Roda and of émigré artists like Guillermo Wiedemann (who had fled Berlin in 1939) and Leopoldo Richter. The country never ceased to impress. Once, while having stolen away on a trip to the colonial city of Popayán in southern Colombia, Albert and Sarah were awakened in the middle of the night by a band of drunken men singing and reciting epic verse as they staggered home. The next day, the provincial governor promised them a car and a driver to show them around—their chauffeur was the son of Maestro Valencia, one of the country’s most celebrated poets and one of the merrymakers the night before.38

  Sarah, for all the challenges making the personal adjustment, organizing family life, and chauffeuring Albert until the promised bank driver materialized, tended to be the agent of their social lives. If Albert tended to be quiet and observe the goings on at social occasions, Sarah was energetic and lively. It was largely through her efforts that the Hirschmans soon had many friends. There was a circle of Russian émigrés to whom Sarah naturally gravitated. She also had her special friends, Gabriela Samper and Hanka Rhodes. They had only one close American friend, the cultural attaché at the embassy, Hugh Ryan. Getting to know Colombians was a bit harder—gentle and kind, they could be hermetic. Sarah never ceased to be appalled by the way gringos in Colombia looked down their noses at the natives, while Albert was no less irritated by the presumption at work that foreign experts had some magical knowledge denied to Colombians. Maybe the initial difficulty making Colombian friends reflected discrete ways Colombians reciprocated the distance between the expatriates and the locals.39

  At first, friends tended to be other émigrés, such as the Friedman family. Lore Friedman was the mother of two children of roughly the same age as the Hirschman girls and a teacher at the Colegio. An Austrian Jew who’d left in 1937 with her husband Fritz, Lore introduced herself to Sarah. Their houses were not far away, and the Friedman children would pass the Hirschman house en route to the Colegio and pick up Lisa and Katia. Out of sight from the windows, the kids would remove their formal school shoes and replace them with more seasoned—and cooler—footwear, then dash the rest of the way to meet up with other friends. During the evenings, the two families would often meet to listen to classical records on the stereo. The Friedmans had a piano, so their home became a hub for local chamber musicians as well. In the summer of 1954, Sarah took the girls to visit her parents in Los Angeles. The Friedmans joined them in California for a holiday, and the two families (minus Albert, who remained in Colombia working) drove up the West Coast of the United States.40

  Though violence wracked the countryside, the capital was going through something of a heyday of visual and performing arts, thanks in part to the number of refugees and émigrés from Europe, who often found Colombia an easier refuge than North America. At the Teatro Colón, concerts brought out the cultural establishment. The Hirschmans began to feel as if the entire audience was full of friends and acquaintances; performances became social occasions.

  One cannot help but observe the contrast with life in Washington. The difference can also be seen at home, perhaps because the girls were more independent and active. Outside the girls’ bathroom, Albert posted a list of commandments:

  Morning jobs:

  1. Brush teeth

  2. Wash face

  3. Brush hair

  4. Do not quarrel

  Evening jobs:

  1. Put away clothes

  2. Make sure playroom is orderly

  3. Brush teeth

  4. Wash face

  5. Prepare school things for next day

  6. Be mischievous

  As the girls grew older, Albert folded them into his affection for word games. Katia used to slip into the bathroom to watch her father shave and together they would make up verses. One was called “The Ocean and the Lotion.”

  I swam in the ocean

  With strong swimming motion

  I carried a lotion

  Which spilled in the ocean.

  And this little lotion

  Must have been quite a potion:

  Ever since the big ocean

  Smelt strangely of lotion!

  Dust-ups between the sisters could be the source of poetic invention. One Saturday morning in January 1954, Albert helped Katia pen this one in her journal, called “Lisa’s Magnetic Eye”:

  In our hall

  We often play ball

  We have lots of fun

  We play and we run

  But once our ball

  Had a very bad fall

  Straight it went into Lisa’s eye

  And the poor little girl began to cry,

  Her father said her eye was magnetic,

  But her mother was much more sympathetic,

  And she said in a voice that was quite energetic:

  “We love our Lisa

  Let nobody tease her!”

  The years in Colombia coincided with a precious stage in the relations between the Hirschmans and their daughters as they passed through childhood to early adolescence. Over dinner, Albert would tell Lisa and Katia stories from the Iliad and Odyssey. He shared recollections of his own lessons from the Collège while the girls sat in rapture. Weekends were occasions to explore en famille with the Chevy to choice destinations around Bogotá and the breathtaking province of Boyacá. A photograph of the Hirschmans, mounted and covered with woolen ruanas, paints a portrait of happy adventurers. The small town of Fusagasuga, nestled in a green valley outside the capital, was an easy day trip. So was the small farm of the Friedman family. Laguna de Tota was a favorite outing. The Hirschmans in their Chevy and the Friedmans in their jeep would set out across dirt roads, through little villages, stopping to visit old colonial churches, explore local markets, and wind their way up the sides of the Andean cordillera to a lar
ge, blue lake in a cold, windswept landscape. There the families would go hiking and stay at local refugios. There were also longer expeditions to the lowlands, the tierra caliente to Bogotanos more accustomed to the Andean altitudes.41