ABSTRACT
Albert Fishlow retired in 2007 as Professor of International and Public Affairs, Director of the Center for Brazilian Studies, and Director of the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia University, New York, New York. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1935 and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1956) and at Harvard University (Ph.D., 1963). He was a member of the Economics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley (1961-77; 1983-94), at Yale University (1978-83), and was Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (1995-9) before moving to Columbia in 2000. He has held visiting positions at the NBER (1963-4), at the Post Graduate School of Economics of the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro (1967-8), and as a Guggenheim Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (1972-3), and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (1975-6). He has been honored with the David A. Wells Prize for 1963-4 and the Joseph Schumpeter Prize in 1971 by Harvard University, and with the National Order of the Southern Cross by the government of Brazil in 1999. The interview took place by telephone in October 1998 and was conducted by E W of Rutgers University, who writes:
Albert Fishlow was present at the birth of cliometrics, opening the debate on the role of the railways in the growth of the American economy with Robert Fogel. After working on nineteenth-century American education and interregional trade, he turned his sights to Latin America. His work on income distribution in Brazil ignited a major controversy, and he helped to spur the growth of cliometric work in Latin America. Not content with just writing about economic change, Fishlow has long been engaged in the study of economic policy and its effects in Latin America.
