Friedrich von Wieser

Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser (July 10, 1851–July 22, 1926) was an early member of the Austrian School of economics. Born in Vienna, the son of Privy Councillor Leopold von Wieser, a high official in the war ministry —Freiherr is a title equivalent to baron, not a personal name—he first trained in sociology and law. In 1872, the year he took his degree, he encountered Austrian-school founder Carl Menger's Grundsätze and switched his interest to economic theory. Wieser held posts at the universities of Vienna and Prague until succeeding Menger in Vienna in 1903, where, with brother-in-law Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, he shaped the next generation of Austrian economists including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter in the late 1890s and early 1900s. He became Austrian finance minister in 1917.