I feel a great debt to Prof. Gerhard Scherhorn for the unselfish help I received from him. Mr. Scherhorn wrote the preface to the “Pyramidenspiel” (The Pyramid Game or Ponzi Scheme) and recommended the publication of “Wohlstand und Armut” (Prosperity and Poverty) by the Metropolis publishing house. I was drawn to his work by a passage in one of Hoimar von Ditfurth’s books where Scherhorn was praised as one of a very limited number of economists critical of the main stream and raising their voice against ecological exploitation.
To Prof. Rürup I owe the active support for my book “Die Arbeitslose Gesellschaft” (Jobless Society). Due to him it was a success – indeed my biggest success as a publicist. At that time, Mr. Rürup oversaw the business series at S. Fischer publishing house. I believe that my other books on economics are neither better nor worse but this fact, certainly, counts much less than the support of influential advocates, especially when books deal with a subject like economic theory that hardly attracts a larger public.
Subsequently, however, I had little reason to rejoice over Mr. Rürup’s patronage, because on one of the first pages of my second book “Das Ende des Kapitalismus – Triumph oder Kollaps eines Wirtschaftssystems” (The End of Capitalism – Triumph or Collapse of an Economic System?, this too published by S. Fischer) Mr. Rürup declared himself my “professional advisor”. I felt this to be strange. We only met twice in Waltersdorf, Styria, each time about an hour, and there was no written correspondence between us. Up to the present day I am at a loss as to when and how this advice was performed.
Likewise I am not really happy with the praise, which Mr. Rürup expressed on the back cover of the “Arbeitslose Gesellschaft” (Jobless Society). Literally he says that the book represents “the most intelligent ideas on the complex of globalization since Robert Reich’s “The End of the World Economy”. Robert Reich, however is not known to ever have written such a work (a book with this title has Nouriel Roubini as its author and was published ten years later). Instead Robert Reich published “The new world economy. The end of the national economy”. Did Prof. Rürup perhaps refer to “The end of Work” by Jeremy Rifkin? I believe that he himself must have felt embarrased by these blunders, for both books were soon no longer in print, although “Die Arbeitslose Gesellschaft” had appeared in four editions.