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Sinn and bedeutung are usually translated, respectively, as sense and reference. Two different aspects of some terms' meanings, a term's reference is the object to which the term refers, while the term's sense is the way that the term refers to that object.

Sinn and bedeutung were introduced by German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" ("On sense and reference"). Frege applied bedeutung mainly to proper names and, in lesser extent, to sentences.

Though the distinction resides in philosophy of language, it enters philosophy's other areas, including philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and metaethics.

Motivation for and development of the distinction[link]

Frege's distinction rejects a view put forward by John Stuart Mill, according to which a proper name has no meaning above and beyond the object to which it refers (its referent or reference). That is, the word "Aristotle" just means Aristotle, that person, and no more. It does not mean "The writer of De Anima." Hence, the sentence Aristotle was Greek says only that that person was Greek. It does not say that the writer of De Anima was Greek. That is, it permits that Aristotle might not have written De Anima. More generally, for any given proposition about Aristotle, one can use the name without believing that proposition to be true of Aristotle.

Frege's central objection to the view that a name's meaning is no more than its referent is that, if a and b are names of the same object, then the identity statement a = b must mean the same as a = a. Yet clearly the first can convey information in a way that the second cannot; that Samuel Clemens is Samuel Clemens is just trivial, but that Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain is interesting. Why? Or, why is Cicero is Tully more significant than Cicero is Cicero? And, by the same token, Samuel Clemens wrote novels and Mark Twain wrote novels would have to mean the same thing but, again, the two sentences seem to convey different information.

Frege's distinction is meant to make sense of these phenomena. He postulates that, in addition to a reference (Bedeutung), a proper name possesses what he calls a sense (Sinn), some aspect of the way its reference is thought of that can differ, even between two names that refer to the same object. The important difference between Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens, for example, is a "difference in the mode of presentation of that which is designated". The sense of an expression is "that wherein the mode of presentation is contained". Thus, one can know both the names Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens without realizing that they are about the same object, because they present that object in different ways, that is, they have different senses. Another demonstrative example for this is the following: "The Leader of the Labour Party in October, 2006" and "the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in October, 2006". These two linguistic expressions differ in sense, but they do have the same referent, that is Tony Blair.

Summarizing:

• The reference is the object that the expression refers to. For instance, the name Mark Twain refers to Mark Twain, i.e. Samuel Clemens, the man who lived in the U.S. and wrote satires. The name Samuel Clemens also refers to that man. Hence the two have the same reference.
• The sense is the "cognitive significance" or "mode of presentation" of the referent.
• Linguistic Expressions with the same reference may have different senses.

Frege uses the following example to illustrate this view. Let a, b, and c be three lines, each of which joins one vertex of a triangle to the midpoint of the opposite side (each of a, b and c is thus a median). Then it is a theorem that

[t]he point of intersection of a and b is then the same as the point of intersection of b and c. So we have different designations for the same point, and these names ('point of intersection of a and b', 'point of intersection of b and c') likewise indicate the mode of presentation; and hence the statement contains actual knowledge. Gottlob Frege, Über Sinn und Bedeutung

At one time, it was common to identify the sense of a name with an identifying description, which would put Frege's view close to the later Russell's description theory of names. For example, the name "Mark Twain" might just mean: The man who wrote Tom Sawyer, and Samuel Clemens might mean: The eldest son of John and Jane Clemens. Thus the reference would be determined as whatever fit the description. This interpretation is now almost unanimously rejected by scholars^{[citation needed]}. Unfortunately, however, a detailed replacement has not been forthcoming. But what is clear is that Frege certainly did not mean that the sense of a name is merely a collection of ideas a particular user of a name happens to associate with it: Because they figure into the meanings of terms in a public language and can be communicated, senses must be objective.

Terminology[link]

Sense and reference (Sinn und Bedeutung)[link]

Broadly speaking, the reference (or referent) of a proper name is the object it denotes or indicates. The sense of a proper name is whatever meaning it has, when there is no object to be indicated.

What this article has called sense and reference are what Frege calls Sinn and Bedeutung, respectively, in the original German. Sometimes the pair of terms is translated as sense and meaning or as sense and nominatum. The precise meaning of these terms can vary quite significantly from writer to writer, so some caution is due.

For Sinn, writers have used the terms sense, meaning, intension, connotation, case^{[disambiguation needed ]}, and content.

For Bedeutung, writers have used the terms reference, referent, meaning, extension, denotation, nominatum, and designatum.

Note that (confusingly) each expression has been translated as meaning by someone.

An expression's relation to sense or reference[link]

Terminology has also been applied to capture the relation between

1. an expression and its sense
2. an expression and its reference

Frege is typically translated as saying that an expression "expresses its sense" and "stands for or designates its reference". Yet earlier in the essay he offers another verb, refers, writing of "that to which the sign refers, which may be called the reference of the sign". Since then writers have variously said that an expression stands for, designates, refers to, or denotes its reference. We can also say that an expression picks out its reference, or (alternatively) that the sense of an expression is what picks out its reference.

Sense without reference[link]

One application Frege saw for the distinction concerns what are called nonreferring, nondenoting, or empty, expressions. These expressions do not have a reference, for example "the greatest integer".^[1] Since there is not a greatest integer, the expression doesn't refer to anything. But it seems perfectly meaningful, since we seem to understand claims like "The greatest integer is larger than one million". Employing the sense-reference distinction, we can say that the expression has a sense but lacks a reference.

Although the term "the greatest integer" has no reference in the conventional arithmetic, in the ultra-intuitionistic arithmetic suggested by Alexander Esenin-Volpin (1960), it has a reference because one of the axioms of this arithmetic is that there is "the greatest integer." So, in one universe, an expression can have sense without reference, while in another universe, the same expression can have both sense and reference.

Another example is Odysseus. Since he is a fictional character, the name Odysseus does not appear to mean anyone at all; yet sentences like "Odysseus was set down on the beach at Ithaca" are meaningful, in that they can be true or false. If a sentence's meaning is a function of the meanings of its parts,^[2] then parts of the sentence, such as Odysseus, seemingly do have meaning.

Whether this solution works, and whether it was even seriously intended by Frege, is disputed. In order for it to work, it must be possible for a term to have a sense without a reference, and this requires that sense cannot be defined simply as the mode of presentation of the reference, since sometimes there is no reference being presented. Thus the view that the sense-reference distinction solves the problem of empty names encourages the view that a sense is an individuating description (which could be understood with or without a reference satisfying it). This makes a sense equivalent to a Russellian description (see below), and makes Frege's position "descriptivist", leaving it prey to a number of difficulties raised against that view. Other philosophers^[who?] have argued that Frege is not a descriptivist, and hence that the sense-reference distinction does not solve the problem of fictional names. Proponents of this view often claim that sentences using empty names do not in fact express propositions, hence are not literally meaningful, despite appearances. They face the difficulty of explaining the apparent meaningfulness of sentences using the word Odysseus. On one view, fictional names merely pretend to express propositions. Our understanding of sentences about Odysseus consists then in our "playing along" (see Gareth Evans, Saul Kripke).

Frege and Russell[link]

Propositions and senses[link]

Bertrand Russell famously rejected Frege's sense-reference distinction, though there is some possibility that the two were misinterpreting and arguing past one another: Frege talks about (for example) sentences, which have both a sense (a proposition) and a reference (a truth value); Russell on the other hand deals directly with propositions, but construes these not as abstract para-linguistic items but as tuples, or sets, of objects and concepts.

For Russell, sense is wholly semantic. Reference by contrast is intimately connected with the named object. Mont Blanc is the referent of the name "Mont Blanc." Frege argues that the thought "Mont Blanc 'with its snowfields'" cannot be a component of the thought that "Mont Blanc is more than 4,000 meters high".^[3] If the same expression "Mont Blanc" is in both sentences then there is something common to each thought, and therefore something corresponding to the name "Mont Blanc." This common element, which cannot be the referent, must be the meaning or "sense."

Senses and descriptions[link]

Russell held the view that most of the apparent proper names in English are in fact "disguised definite descriptions". So "Aristotle" is understood as "The pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander", or by some other unique description. Although Russell explicitly rejected Frege's notion of sense, he rejected it just for proper names. But Russell also held the view (not evident in the Mont Blanc example) that most of the "proper names" in English are not names at all, but descriptions in disguise. Possibly the only real proper names were demonstrative pronouns like this and that (directed at an object that can be immediately perceived). So in fact if Frege's view was "descriptivist", then he effectively agrees with Russell on most of the apparent "proper names" of ordinary language: Frege thinks that "Aristotle" is a name, with a sense, which is equivalent to some description. Russell thinks that Aristotle is not really a name, but is (in disguised form) just such a description.

Thus for most of the twentieth century the "Frege-Russell" descriptivist view was taken as something of an orthodoxy. In Saul Kripke's famous Naming and Necessity lectures, which largely turned the tide against descriptivism, he treats both Russell and Frege as opposed to Mill's view in the same way. Thus Kripke's argument that names are not equivalent to descriptions was widely construed as the view that names do not have senses; or as a rejection of the sense-reference distinction. (Tellingly, all of the three problems the distinction aimed to solve have subsequently re-emerged as important problems in the philosophy of language.)

This reading of Frege has been rejected by many scholars, most strongly by Gareth Evans in The Varieties of Reference^[4] and by John McDowell in "The Sense and Reference of a Proper Name",^[5] following lines developed by Michael Dummett. Dummett argues that Frege's notion of sense should not be equated with a description. Evans further developed this line, arguing that a sense without a referent was not possible. He and McDowell both take the line that Frege's discussion of empty names, and of the idea of sense without reference, are inconsistent, and that his apparent endorsement of descriptivism rests only on a small number of imprecise and perhaps offhand remarks. And both point to the power that the sense-reference distinction 'does' have (i.e., to solve at least the first two problems), even if it is not given a descriptivist reading. '

Relation to connotation and denotation[link]

The sense-reference distinction is commonly confused with that between connotation and denotation, which predates Frege and is famously interpreted by Mill. This distinction is applied mainly to words (particularly predicates) expressing properties (e.g., red, dog, bachelor), rather than naming individuals, so the difference between the two distinctions can be hard to see. The connotation of a predicate is the concept it expresses, or more often, the set of properties that determine whether an individual falls under it. The denotation of a concept is the actual collection of entities that do fall under it. Thus the connotation of bachelor is perhaps "unmarried adult male human" and its denotation is all the bachelors in the world.

Under a descriptivist reading of Frege, sense and reference are probably the same as connotation and denotation.

Under a non-descriptivist reading, they are probably not. It is always possible to have a connotation without a denotation, which may not be the case with sense and reference. A given sense always determines the same reference, which might not be the case with connotation and denotation. Most clearly, a single concept—which by definition has only one connotation and denotation (at a time), might be expressed by terms having different senses. For example, cat and feline have precisely the same connotation (member of the Felidae family of carnivorous mammals), and obviously the same denotation (all the cats; that is, all the felines), but it is perfectly intelligible that someone should fail to realize that cat and feline mean the same—perhaps they have only heard one word applied to housecats, the other to tigers and lions. In that case, the words have different senses.

See also[link]

• Aliasing (computing), an example of "sense and reference" in computer programming, where two or more pointers or references point to the same memory location or object
• Dihydrogen monoxide hoax, that exploits the ignorance of many people that the two senses "dihydrogen monoxide" and "water" refer to the same chemical substance "H₂O", similarly to Frege's example of Hesperus is Phosphorus
• Gottlob Frege
• Mediated reference theory
• On Denoting, which outlined Bertrand Russell's Philosophy of Language
• Quiddity and Haecceity, similar concepts from Medieval philosophy.
• Russell's Paradox, a puzzle-conflict between Russell and Frege
• Theory of descriptions

Footnotes[link]

1. ^ Frege's example is "the least rapidly convergent series", and there is always "the present King of France".
2. ^ See Semantic composition
3. ^ This example is from a letter to Russell.
4. ^ Evans, Gareth (1982). John McDowell. ed. The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
5. ^ McDowell, John (April 1977). "On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name". Mind. New Series 86 (342). 

External links[link]

• Gottlob Frege: Über Sinn und Bedeutung
• Gottlob Frege: On Sense and Reference (English translation by Max Black)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Frege and Language.
• Frege's Contribution to the Philosophy of Language by Richard G. Heck and Robert May, published in the Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Language

Trevor Ó Clochartaigh is an Irish Sinn Féin politician.

Born and raised in England, Ó Clochartaigh's parents came from the Connemara area of County Galway. He attended NUI Galway, graduating with a Commerce degree. He worked in Irish language theatre and television production including producer of Fair City and Ros na Rún, and in community development projects.^[1]

He first entered politics as a member of the Labour Party, unsuccessfully contesting the Connemara area of Galway County Council in the 2004 local elections.^[2] He subsequently left Labour and joined Sinn Féin, and was the party's candidate at the local elections of 2009 and for election to Dáil Éireann in the Galway West constituency at the general election of 2011, but failed to be elected.^[1][2]

In April 2011 he was elected to Seanad Éireann on the Agricultural Panel.^[3]

References[link]

This article about a politician from Ireland is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Francie Molloy ( Irish Proinsias Ó Maolmhuaidh) MLA is a Sinn Féin politician and a deputy speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

He first stood for Sinn Féin in Fermanagh and South Tyrone in the 1982 Assembly Elections finishing as runner-up 542 votes behind the DUP candidate with over 1400 SDLP votes non-transferable. He was then elected to Dungannon council in 1985 representing the Coalisland area. He retired from the council in 1989 but was re-elected in 1993 and has been a councillor since then.

Molloy stood unsuccessfully for Sinn Féin in the European election, 1994.

Molloy was elected to the Northern Ireland Forum in 1996 representing Mid-Ulster and then for the same constituency to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1998, 2003 and 2007.

In 2005, Molloy was temporarily suspended from Sinn Féin after publicly disagreeing with the party policy on eliminating many district councils, including the Dungannon Council of which he was a member.

External links[link]

• Profile from Sinn Féin website
• Profile from Northern Ireland Assembly website
• Suspension for contradicting SF policy

This article about a Northern Ireland politician is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

David Grossman
David Grossman
Born	(1954-01-25) January 25, 1954 (age 58) Jerusalem, Israel
Occupation	Writer
Citizenship	Israeli
Alma mater	The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Notable award(s)	1985 & 1993 Bernstein Prize 2001 Sapir Prize 2004 JQ Wingate Prize 2004 Bialik Prize 2007 Emet Prize 2007 Ischia International Journalism Award 2008 Geschwister-Scholl-Preis 2010 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2011 JQ Wingate Prize
Spouse(s)	Michal Grossman
Children	3

David Grossman (Hebrew: דויד גרוסמן‎; born January 25, 1954) is an Israeli author. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and have won numerous prizes.

He is also a noted activist and critic of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. The Yellow Wind, his non-fiction study of the life of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip met with acclaim abroad but sparked controversy at home. Alongside Amos Oz, he has been one of the most prominent cultural advocates of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his latest novel, To the End of the Land. Since that book's publication he has written a children's book, an opera for children and several poems.^[1]

Biography[link]

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem. He is the eldest of two brothers.

His mother, Michaella, was born in Mandate Palestine; his father, Yitzhak, emigrated from Poland with his widowed mother at the age of nine. His mother's family was Zionist and poor, his grandfather having paved roads in the Galilee and supplementing his income by buying and selling rugs. His maternal grandmother was a manicurist. His paternal grandmother left Poland after being harassed by police, never before having left the region where she'd been born. Along with her son and daughter, she traveled to Palestine where she became a cleaner in wealthy neighbourhoods.

Grossman's father was a bus driver, then a librarian, and it was through him that David – "a reading child" – was able to build up an interest in literature, which would later become his career. Grossman recalled, "He gave me many things, but what he mostly gave me was Sholem Aleichem." Aleichem, who was born in Ukraine, is one of the greatest writers in Yiddish, though he is now best known as the man whose stories were the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof.^[1]

In 1971, Grossman began his national service working in military intelligence. Although he was in the army when the Yom Kippur war broke out in 1973, he saw no action.^[1]

Grossman studied philosophy and theater at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After university, Grossman began working in radio, where he'd once been a child actor, eventually becoming an anchor on Kol Yisrael, Israel's national broadcasting service. In 1988 he was sacked for refusing to bury the news that the Palestinian leadership had declared its own state and conceded Israel's right to exist.^[1]

Grossman lives in Mevasseret Zion on the outskirts of Jerusalem. He is married to Michal Grossman, a child psychologist and the mother of his three children, Jonathan, 28, Ruth, 18, and the late Uri.

Politics and activism[link]

David Grossman, Leipzig

David Grossman, 2012

Grossman is an outspoken peace activist who is politically left wing.^[1]

Initially supportive of Israel's action during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict on the grounds of self defence, on August 10, 2006, he and fellow authors Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua held a press conference at which they strongly urged the government to agree to a ceasefire that would create the basis for a negotiated solution saying: "We had a right to go to war. But things got complicated... I believe that there is more than one course of action available."^[1]

Two days later, his 20-year-old son Uri, a staff sergeant in an armoured unit, was killed by an anti-tank missile during an IDF operation in southern Lebanon shortly before the ceasefire.^[2] However, Grossman explained that the death of his son did not change his opposition to Israel's policy towards the Palestinians.^[1] Although Grossman had carefully avoided writing about politics, in his stories, if not his journalism, the death of his son prompted him to deal with the Israeli-Palestintian conflict in greater detail. This appeared in his latest book To The End of the Land.^[1]

Two months after his son's death, Grossman addressed a crowd of 100,000 Israelis who had gathered to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. He denounced Ehud Olmert's government for a failure of leadership and he argued that reaching out to the Palestinians was the best hope for progress in the region.

Of course I am grieving, but my pain is greater than my anger. I am in pain for this country and for what you [Olmert] and your friends are doing to it.^[1]

About his personal link to the war, Grossman said:

There were people who stereotyped me, who considered me this naive leftist who would never send his own children into the army, who didn't know what life was made of. I think those people were forced to realise that you can be very critical of Israel and yet still be an integral part of it; I speak as a reservist in the Israeli army myself.^[1]

In 2010 Grossman, his wife, and her family attended demonstrations against the spread of Israeli Settlements. While attending weekly demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah [in east Jerusalem] against Jewish settlers taking over houses in Palestinian neighbourhoods he was assaulted by police. About the incident Grossman said, "we were beaten by the police." When asked by a reporter for The Guardian newspaper about how a renowned writer could be beaten he replied, "I don't know if they know me at all."^[1]

Awards and honors[link]

• In 1984, Grossman won the Prime Minister's Prize for Creative Work;
• In 1985 and again in 1993, he was awarded the Bernstein Prize (original Hebrew novel category);
• In 2001, he was award the Sapir Prize for Someone to Run With;
• In 2004, he was award the JQ Wingate Prize (fiction) for Someone to Run With;
• In 2004, he was awarded the Italian prize Premio Flaiano;^[3]
• In 2004, he was a co-recipient (jointly with Haya Shenhav and Ephraim Sidon) of the Bialik Prize for literature;^[4]
• In 2007, he was awarded the Emet Prize;
• In 2007, he received the Ischia International Journalism Award;
• On February 2, 2007, he was awarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium;
• In 2008, he received the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis;
• In 2010, he received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade;
• In 2011, he was award the JQ Wingate Prize for To the End of the Land.

In 2005, he was voted the 97th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.^[5]

Fiction in English translation[link]

• Duel [דו קרב / Du-krav, 1982]. London: Bloomsbury, 1998, ISBN 0-7475-4092-6
• The Smile of the Lamb [חיוך הגדי / Hiyukh ha-gedi: roman, 1983]. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990, ISBN 0-374-26639-5
• See Under: Love [עיין ערך: אהבה / Ayen erekh—-ahavah: roman, 1986]. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989, ISBN 0-374-25731-0
• The Book of Intimate Grammar [ספר הדקדוק הפנימי / Sefer ha-dikduk ha-penimi: roman, 1991]. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994, ISBN 0-374-11547-8
• The Zigzag Kid [יש ילדים זיג זג / Yesh yeladim zigzag, 1994]. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997, ISBN 0-374-52563-3 – won two prizes in Italy: the Premio Mondello in 1996, and the Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1997.
• Be My Knife [שתהיי לי הסכין / She-tihyi li ha-sakin, 1998]. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001, ISBN 0-374-29977-3
• Someone to Run With [מישהו לרוץ איתו / Mishehu laruts ito, 2000]. London: Bloomsbury, 2003, ISBN 0-7475-6207-5
• Her Body Knows: two novellas [בגוף אני מבינה / Ba-guf ani mevinah: tsemed novelot, 2003]. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005, ISBN 0-374-17557-8
• To the End of the Land [אישה בורחת מבשורה / Isha Borahat MiBesora, 2008]. Jessica Cohen, trans. Knopf, 2010, ISBN 0-307-59297-9

Nonfiction in English translation[link]

• The Yellow Wind [הזמן הצהוב / Ha-Zeman ha-tsahov, 1987]. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988, ISBN 0-374-29345-7
• Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel [נוכחים נפקדים / Nokhehim Nifkadim, 1992]. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993, ISBN 0-374-17788-0
• Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years after Oslo [מוות כדרך חיים / Mavet ke-derech khayyim, 2003]. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003, ISBN 0-374-10211-2
• Lion’s honey : the myth of Samson [דבש אריות / Dvash arayiot, 2005]. Edinburgh; New York: Canongate, 2006, ISBN 1-84195-656-2

Films[link]

• Smile of the Lamb (novel) was the basis for an award-winning film written and directed by Shimon Dotan.
• Someone to Run With (novel) was the basis for a film directed by Oded Davidoff.^[6]

See also[link]

Novels portal

• List of Bialik Prize recipients

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: David Grossman

• David Grossman: Writing against the Mechanism of Retaliation
• Johanna Baum, A Literary Analysis of Tramatic Neurosis in Israeli Society: David Grossman's See Under: Love, Other Voices, vol. 2.1.
• Institute for Translation of Hebrew Literature, David Grossman (bibliography with brief biography). Retrieved January 12, 2005.
• Eli ESHED, "Is Naava Home? Naava's Not Home" נאווה בבית? נאווה לא בבית] (Hebrew). Retrieved January 12, 2005.
• Grossman's speech at the Rabin Memorial November 4, 2006 [1] Retrieved November 20, 2006.
• internationales literaturfestival berlin http://www.literaturfestival.com/bios1_3_6_989.html
• Jonathan Shainin (Fall 2007). "David Grossman, The Art of Fiction No. 194". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5794/the-art-of-fiction-no-194-david-grossman. 
• David Grossman at the Internet Movie Database

• Works by or about David Grossman in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Hans-Werner Sinn

Neoclassical economics
Born	(1948-03-07) March 7, 1948 (age 64) Brake, Westphalia
Nationality	Germany
Institution	Ifo Institute for Economic Research
Field	Macroeconomics
Alma mater	University of Mannheim University of Münster
Opposed	Rudolf Hickel, Peter Bofinger
Information at IDEAS/RePEc

Hans-Werner Sinn (born March 7, 1948) is a German economist and President of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research.

Education and career[link]

After studying economics at the University of Münster from 1967 to 1972 and receiving his doctorate from the University of Mannheim in 1978, Sinn was awarded the venia legendi in 1983, also from the University of Mannheim.

Since 1984 Sinn has been full professor in the faculty of economics at the University of Munich (LMU), first holding the chair for economics and insurance, and from 1994 the chair for economics and public finance. During leaves of absence from Mannheim and Munich he held visiting professorships (1978/79 and 1984/85) at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. During sabbaticals he was also visiting researcher at the London School of Economics, as well as at Bergen, Stanford, Princeton and Jerusalem Universities. Since 1988 he has been honorary professor of the University of Vienna, where he has held many lectures. Since 1 February 1999 Sinn has been president of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. In 2006 he became president of the International Institute of Public Finance. From 1997 to 2000 Sinn headed the Verein für Socialpolitik, the association of German-speaking economists.

Sinn is fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the first German-speaking economist to deliver the Yrjö Jahnsson Lectures^[1] in Helsinki (1999) and the Tinbergen Lectures in Amsterdam (2004).^[2]

In the 2006 Handelsblatt ranking of German economists (Ökonomen-Ranking VWL), based on cross citations of SSCI papers in SSCI journals, Sinn ranked fourth.^[3] In a study by Ursprung and Zimmer,^[4] based on SSCI citations per author of the full oeuvre, Sinn ranked second of all German economists, after Nobel laureate Reinhard Selten. In the RePEc database he was the German economist most frequently quoted in academic works in 2006.^[5] In a survey conducted by the Financial Times Deutschland among more than 550 German economic experts, Sinn was one of the two professors in Germany (the other was Herbert Giersch) to attract a large following of academic pupils, and in terms of political influence he ranked only behind Bert Rürup at the top of the list of German professors.^[6] The British newspaper The Independent nominated him as one of the “ten people who changed the world” in 2011.^[7]

Sinn has published many journal articles, has written numerous newspaper articles and given many newspaper interviews. In addition he has made longer contributions for radio and television and has made many talk-show appearances. More than twenty articles on his person have been published in German and foreign newspapers.^[8] His 2003 book "Ist Deutschland noch zu retten?" has stimulated policy discussion in Germany and influenced the Agenda 2010 reforms. With more than 100,000 copies in print, the book is one of the most popular public policy monograph in recent history. It has also been published in English as "Can Germany be Saved?" by MIT Press in 2007. As a reaction to the criticism of his book in the media, Sinn wrote a follow-up book in 2005, "Die Basarökonomie". His most recent book, "Das grüne Paradoxon", outlines his concept of the Green paradox and was published in October 2008.

Since 1989 Sinn has served on the Advisory Council of the German Ministry of Economics and he represents the Free State of Bavaria on the Board of Supervisors of HypoVereinsbank.^[9]

Sinn lives with his wife near Munich. They have three adult children.

Research[link]

With the exception of his diploma dissertation, also published in a journal, on the Marxian Law of the tendential decline of the rate of profit,^[10] Sinn dealt in his early years particularly with economic risk theory. He made a name for himself with his dissertation "Ökonomische Entscheidungen bei Ungewissheit" (1980), published in English as "Economic Decisions under Uncertainty" (1983), with numerous spin-off articles. Subsequent work focused on the axiomatic basis of mean-variance analysis, on the foundation of the principle of insufficient reason, on the psychological foundation of risk preference functions and on the analysis of risk decisions under limited liability, which he subsequently developed into a theory of bank regulation in his Yrjö Jahnsson Lectures, "The New Systems Competition". In 2003, in the journal Finanzarchiv, he touched off an academic debate on banking regulation in which he was criticised by liberal economists for his favouring of stronger banking regulation to prevent excess risk-taking. With his disseration in 1977 on excess risk propensity under liability restrictions, Sinn, in the opinion of Martin Hellwig, preceded the pioneering analysis of Stiglitz and Weiss of 1981.^[11] His work in this area was published as a reprint volume in 2008. On the basis of his research on risk theory, Sinn developed his influential theory of the insurer state, in which he interpreted the redistributing activity of the state via the tax-transfer system as insurance protection, showing that this activity can have a favourable influence on people's willingness to take risks. His work on the Theory of the Welfare State in 1995 is considered an important contribution on the legitimacy of state redistribution activity.^[12]

Sinn has published numerous studies on the theory of economic cycles, environmental economics, foreign trade issues, including ones on the so-called asset approach and on the micro foundations of a model of temporary general equilibrium.

Problems of longer-term economic growth were also on his research agenda. Sinn was the first economist to formulate the central-planning model of economic growth in the tradition of Robert Solow as a general equilibrium model with decentrally optimizing agents and market clearing conditions in an article published in German in 1980 and two years later in English, and before similar work by Chamley in 1981 and Abel and Blanchard in 1983.^{[13][14][15][16]}

His study on the stimulating effects of accelerated depreciation and the various components of capital income taxation on intertemporal, international and intersectoral allocation is still considered one of the standard works in this field.^[17]

Sinn contributed to the discussion on German pension reform with his article "Pension Reform and Demographic Crisis. Why a Funded System is Needed and Why it is Not Needed" published in 2000.^[18] Here, with the help of cash-value equivalents, he showed that the low returns from statutory pension insurance based on the pay-as-you-go method has only an apparent efficiency disadvantage in comparison to a capitally funded procedure. This finding was further developed in a number of subsequent studies.

Recently Sinn has turned to the problem of the global climate in an article "Public Policies against Global Warming" and in his book "Das grüne Paradoxon" (The Green Paradox). In these studies Sinn developed a supply-side theory of climate change by linking climate-theory approaches with the theory of exhaustible natural resources. The Green paradox that he has identified states that environmental policies that over time promote with increasing intensity substitute technologies and in the process lower the prices for fossil fuels will induce the resource suppliers to accelerate extraction, thus contributing to global warming.

Economic-policy positions[link]

With regard to long-term structural problems, Sinn is a proponent of supply-side positions. In 2005 he was one of the first German economists to sign the "Hamburger Appell", which argued for fundamental market-economy reforms and rejected demand-oriented concepts of economic policy. At the same time Sinn employs the instruments of Keynesian demand theory for his analyses of economic activity. With his studies on pension insurance, in which he argued for partial capital funding, as well as by providing direct advice to the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (Germany) (through CES, his university institute) and by contributing to an expertise on pensions for the Ministry of Economics, Sinn had a hand in the introduction of the "Riester-Rente", a privately financed pension scheme support by the German government in the form of grants and tax deductions.

In 2003 he saw Germany's attractiveness as an investment location endangered by too high labour costs and called for structural reforms of the labour market. These include escape clauses for collective wage agreements, the abolition of dismissal protection laws and longer working hours without wage compensation. He has also criticised the employment-restricting effects of the German wage replacement system. As an alternative he developed in 2002 the model of activating social welfare. His policy recommendations influenced the Agenda 2010 reforms.

Sinn has called the German economy a bazaar economy since the share of input from abroad in German industrial production is on the increase. At the same time he points out that this is not to be equated with a breaking off of value added in exports. Instead Germany has decimated its domestic sector via excessive wage increases and has driven excess amounts of capital and skilled labour into the labour and knowledge-intensive export sectors, where fewer less-skilled workers can be employed as have been set free in the domestic sectors. At the expense of the domestic sectors, Germany has inflated value added in exports too strongly and at the same time has placed too much emphasis on the final stages of production. As a result a pathological export boom occurred.

The world economy crisis is traced back by Sinn to an abuse of liability limitation by American investment banks. The lack of capital reserve requirements gave these banks the possibility to pursue their business with inadequate capital reserves and encouraged them to gamble. In addition the lack of personal liability for homeowners created in a similar way an exaggerated willingness to take risks and thus caused the American real-estate crisis. To correct this situation Sinn has called for considerably higher capital reserve requirements, the balancing of offshore business and a return to the accounting principle of the lower of cost of the German Commercial Code (HGB).^[19]

Against the background of the world economic crisis, Sinn advocates a return to the tradition of ordoliberalism and of ordoliberal economists like Walter Eucken, Alfred Müller-Armack, Alexander Rüstow, and Ludwig Erhard, who argued a strong state should provide a framework or economic order inside which market forces and free market competition can develop.^[20] Markets do not regulate themselves (Selbstregulierung), but are capable of self controlled processes (Selbststeuerung) inside an institutional framework provided by the state.^[21]

Sinn accuses the Greens of pursuing environmental protection policies with unsuitable means and of ignoring the economic laws of the European emissions trading system as well as the worldwide market for fossil fuel. In his book, The Green Paradox, he argues for including all countries of the world in a post-Kyoto, joint emissions trading system. He also favours employing a withholding tax on the yields of financial investments to curb the desire of the resource providers to extract more fossil fuels.

During the 10th Munich Economic Summit, Sinn brought to public attention the fact that the ECB had been conducting what he termed a “stealth bailout” of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain for the past three years, financing practically their entire current account by allowing them to accumulate massive liabilities in their TARGET2 accounts.^[22] He subsequently published his views in the press ^[23][24] and specialized websites,^[25][26] followed by a working paper that analyzed the issue in detail.^[27] He also discussed Germany's capital exports since the introduction of the euro and the prospects such exports could face if the euro crisis continues and leads to the introduction of Eurobonds, which he opposes.^[28]

Controversy[link]

On October 26, 2008 in an interview with the Tagesspiegel about the 2008 financial crisis, Sinn drew a parallel between the current crisis and the Great Depression of 1929. During the course of the interview, Sinn characterized German business managers as scapegoats in the current crisis, whereas in 1929 the Jews were cast as scapegoats.^[29] Politicians from the Social Democratic Party of Germany and Green Party as well as bishop Margot Käßmann, economist Rudolf Hickel, and the Central Council of Jews in Germany sharply criticized Sinn's comment as equating manager criticism with the persecution of the Jews.^[30] Likewise, the German federal cabinet asked Sinn for a clarification.^[31] On the next day, Sinn apologized in an open letter, stating: "In no way did I mean to compare the fate of the Jews after 1933 to the current situation of German managers. Such a comparison would be absurd."^[32] The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Europe welcomed the swift apology. A number of Jewish economists and other scholars, including Nobel laureate Robert Solow, have defended Sinn and criticised the interpretation of his remark in the German press.^[33] Robert Solow, in a letter to Sinn on 31 December 2008, remarked that this "simple statement" was "true, relevant and innocent". The Protestant theologian Richard Schröder, member of the German Ethical Council, wrote in a letter to the editor of the Tagesspiegel that he agreed absolutely with Sinn's much maligned remarks. Both letters are contained in a documentation prepared by the Ifo Institute.^[34][35]

Public Influence[link]

According to a poll conducted jointly by the Financial Times Deutschland and the Verein für Socialpolitik (the German economics association) among 550 German economics experts in 2006, “only two representatives of our profession exert an appreciable influence on policymaking: Bert Rürup and Hans-Werner Sinn”.^[36] A study in 2007 placed Sinn, in terms of number of citations in scientific journals, second to German Nobel laureate Reinhard Selten.^[37] The British newspaper The Independent named Sinn among the ten most important people who changed the world in 2011.^[38] The German Business weekly WirtschaftsWoche ranked Sinn 62 among the 100 most powerful people in Germany, and placed him in the No. 1 position among the “Most Important Economists” in the country.^[39]