Until I myself became a blogmeister, I had been blissfully unaware of the backside design choices involved in blogmeistering. Indeed there awaited an entirely new set of meanings associated with words long comfortable in my pre-blog vocabulary such as “theme”. When you set up a blog, you must first enter a virtual showroom of themes, a collection of templates that package color schemes, page widgets, plugins etc for you, the blogmeister, to fill with your postings. Being a rookie in this league, I chose what I expected would be a keep-it-simple-stupid (KISS) theme that would allow me to concentrate on providing text content. Soon I realized that having a nice graphic for each posting provides welcome visual relief and, I hoped, a memory tag to make the posting-visitor bond strong enough to outlast the session.
Because there are so many more good (and not-so-good) economists than great (and truly important wrong) economic ideas, a serious history of economics soon falls victim to the curse of dimensionality. Portraits help me keep the names straight and to never forget that economists are indeed economics made flesh and they too were once young. Dealing primarily with defunct academic scribblers necessarily implies that most of the photographs are monochromatic which turns out to be a feature since black-and-white images fit quite well into the black-and-white-with-red-accents theme chosen for Economics in the Rear-view Mirror. Given my ambition to be blogger of (mostly) new content, I figured a little search for less-iconic images and especially those close in time to the content of my postings would result in higher value-added.
One truly great source of historical images is the U.S. Library of Congress. When I searched for “economists”, the 96th image was that below for Dr. Paasche. In my earlier research life I was deeply into economic index numbers (e.g. my 1999 comment (beginning page 87) that follows a NBER chapter about the theory of multilateral index numbers written by Erwin Diewert and “The DM and the Ossi Consumer: Price Indexes During Transition” published in 2012) so I was absolutely delighted to find myself looking Hermann Paasche straight in the eye for the first time.
The Hamburg photography studio of Emilie Bieber (1810-1884) was taken over by her nephew Leonard Berlin (1841-1931) in 1872. In 1890 he opened the “E. Bieber” photography studio in Berlin. In 1897 Leonard began to go by the name Leonard Berlin-Bieber. In that year he was also awarded the title “Photographer of the Court” by King Wilhelm II of Prussia. Having a photo portrait done at the Bieber studio was something that one just had to do. In 1911 Leonard Berlin-Bieber closed the Berlin studio and his son Emil Bieber took over the business now concentrated in Hamburg. In 1938 Emil was forced to sell the business and the family emigrated first to England then to South Africa. This particular image comes from the George Grantham Bain Collection (a collection of photographic files of an early U.S. news picture agency).
The University of Rostock where Hermann Paasche was a professor has a website Catalogus Professorum Rostochiensium where you can find the following outline of his career. At the bottom is noted “died early April 1925 in Detroit while travelling in North America.”
Image Source: Library of Congress website.
