This is a brief but critical survey of the life and accomplishments of the Czech economist Ota Sik. He joint Communist Youth organization already before the WWII. During the war, he was in the Mauthausen concentration camp, together with the future secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and president of Czechoslovakia Antonin Novotny. That helped him to get some prestigeous position in the Communist Party soon after the war. First he was quite orthodox Marxian economist, but after he was appointed as the Director of the Economic Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, he started to be critical of the Stalinist system and eventually became a head of the movement for the economic reform of 1960's. After the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 he emmigrated from Czechoslovakia and became a professor of economics in Switzerland. There he was more and more critical of the Soviet version of centrally planned socialism, but never fully accepted a free-market capitalism. As a result he advocated the 'Third Way' social and economic system.
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