ancient cities

In 1936, Lösch’s Rockefeller fellowship was
extended for another year. During his U.S.
visit, he met again with Schumpeter, who had
moved to Harvard and who received him “like a
father.” In Schumpeter’s seminar, he met old
friends like Wolfgang Stolper—whom he knew
from Schumpeter’s seminar in Bonn—and made
new ones—like Edgar M. Hoover, Jr., then
Schumpeter’s assistant. Deeply impressed by the
diversity of the country, where he traveled rather
extensively during his second visit, and by the
spirit of freedom in America, Lösch began research
on the topic of economic regions.
In 1933, after Machtergreifung by the Nazi
party, Lösch wrote in his diary: “I will walk
upright through these hopeless times.” Many of his
friends decided to leave Germany for good, and his
birthrate book had been indexed by the German
authorities in 1936. Nevertheless, he returned to
his home country in 1937. “What would become
of Germany, if all of us were leaving?” he asked.
During the following years, he worked in
Heidenheim and Bonn as a freelance scientist on
the manuscript of Spatial Order, which he completed
in the fall of 1939. In 1940, the year when
the first edition of this book was published, he
entered the Kiel Institute for World Economics,
where he worked as a coresearcher and later as
the leader of a research group. Under the protection
of the Kiel Institute, he wrote in a letter to a
friend, “I could avoid to fight for Hitler.”
His gratitude to the institute did not prevent
Lösch from criticizing its policies. In his diary, he
complained that the institute director forced on
him “totally useless” reports, thus deliberately
keeping him from productive work on his currency
plan.
The currency plan that Lösch worked on during
the last years of World War II and of his life
dealt with developing a currency system that
would, after the end of the war, help reintegrate
the world economy. The first part of the concept
is based on the assumption that a single world
currency exists. The transfer system then works in
relation to distance and the distribution of activities
in space. Introducing partial currencies and
thus approaching reality again, the point of view
of the spatial distribution of activities is dominant
in explaining the impact of price-level move ments
and price fluctuations on the rates of exchange.
Lösch, August
473
In October 1944, after heavy air raids by allied
forces on the city of Kiel, Lösch and his research
group were evacuated to the small town of
Ratzeburg. Here, weakened from exhaustion and
the lack of medical attention, he died from an
attack of scarlet fever on May 30, 1945. He did not
complete his currency theory. The fragment was
published posthumously in Weltwirtschaftliches
Archiv 1949.
Intellectual Legacy
Lösch’s Economics of Location is a book with
many facets and is easy neither to read nor to
understand. Lösch subdivides it into four parts: I.
Location, II. Economic Areas, III. Trade, and IV.
Examples. While the explorations elaborated in
these four parts are closely interrelated, the most
important and revolutionary concepts are developed
in Part II.
Here, Lösch starts from the following set
of assumptions: Economic activity takes place on
an unlimited homogeneous plane where the
population—equipped with equal preferences and
Lösch’s Ideal Central-Place Hierarchy
Source: Lösch, A. 1954. The Economics of Location.
Translated by W. H. Woglom and W. F. Stolper. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.