Rudolf Hickel is a German economist and author. He transferred to the University of Bremen in 1971, accepting the chair in "Finanzwissenschaft" (loosely, "public finance") in 1993. Between 2001 and 2009 he served as director of the university's Institute for Labour and Economics ("Institut Arbeit und Wirtschaft" / IAW). A long standing critic of developments in western Market Capitalism since the 1980s, he has engaged powerfully in the economic debates emerging during the aftermath of the 2007/2008 Financial crisis. Biography Provenance and early years Rudolf Hickel was born into a Catholic family in Nuremberg at the height of the Second World War. He shares his name with his father, who was the concertmaster ("in English-language terms, leader of the orchestra") with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. Hickel grew up in Bad Wildbad, a little town in south-west Germany which after 1945 became part of the French occupation zone and then, in May 1949, of the German Federal Republic (West Germany). He attended middle school locally. He still keeps, in a case of memorabilia, the quarter-sized violin he used for his violin lessons when he was small, even though he was not permitted to play the instrument at home: "... wrong notes put my father in a white sweat". He attended school at the business oriented secondary school ("Wirtschaftsgymnasium") in nearby Pforzheim, and it was here that he passed his "Abitur" (school finals), opening the way for progression to university-level education. A Catholic upbringing left him critical of the pope on many fronts, but he would always be grateful that the church financed his studies with a scholarship. Otherwise, as he told an interviewer in 2011, "at home there was no money". Student years Rainer Hickel, his younger brother, would build a career as a professional musician, but it seems to have been accepted by the time he left school that Rudolf Hickel would follow another path. Between 1962 and 1967 he studied Economics on a Cusanuswerk stipendium at the University of Tübingen, from which he earned a "Dipl. Volkswirt" degree in (loosely) Applied Economics. He remained at Tübingen as a research assistant for a further two years, with a focus on Economic Theory. That was followed by a period as a research assistant at the newly inaugurated University of Konstanz during 1969/70, where he was involved in building up the Economics department. It was from the University of Konstanz that in