Paul A. Baran

For the computer scientist, see Paul Baran.

Economist Paul A. Baran as he appeared in the late 1950s.

Paul Alexander Baran (25 August 1909, Mykolaiv, Russian Empire, today Ukraine – 26 March 1964, Palo Alto, California, USA) was an American economist known for his Marxist views. In 1951 Baran was promoted to full professor at Stanford University and Baran was the only tenured Marxian economist in the United States until his death in 1964. Baran wrote The Political Economy of Growth in 1957 and co-authored Monopoly Capital with Paul Sweezy.

Life and work

Baran was born in Russia. His father, a Menshevik, left the USSR for Vilna (then Poland) in 1917. From Vilna the Baran family moved to Berlin, and then, in 1915 back to Moscow, but Paul stayed in Germany to finish his secondary school. In 1926 he attended the Plekhanov Institute in Moscow. He left again for Germany to be an assistant on agricultural research with his advisor. Baran remained in German associated with the Frankfurt School Institute for Social Research. He next wrote a dissertation under Emile Lederer on economic planning. He met Rudolf Hilferding, author of Finance Capital and wrote under the pen name of Alexander Gabriel for the German Social Democratic Party journal "Die Gesellschaft."

After the Nazi regime took power, Baran fled to Paris and then back to the USSR, and then to Vilna, (then in Poland). With the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and just before the Nazi invasion of Poland he emigrated to the US, where he enrolled at Harvard and received a Masters degree. Short of funds, he left the PhD program and worked for the Brookings Institution and then for the Office of Price Administration and then the Office of Strategic Services. He worked under John Kenneth Galbraith at the Strategic Bombing Survey traveling to post-war Germany and Japan. Baran then worked for the United States Department of Commerce and lectured at George Washington University. He then worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before resigning to join academia.

He married Elena Djatschenko, had a son Nicholas but soon divorced. Baran had his academic career in the United States, teaching at Stanford University from 1949. From 1949, he was an active participant in the formulation of editorial ideas and opinions in Monthly Review magazine edited by Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman. Baran visited Cuba in 1960 along with Sweezy and Huberman, and was greatly inspired. In 1962 he revisited Moscow, Iran, and Yugoslavia. In his last years he worked on Monopoly Capital with Sweezy. He died before it was completed by Sweezy. Baran died from a heart attack in 1964. He is sometimes associated with the Neo-Marxian school of thought.

Paul Baran's most significant analytical innovation in economics is his critical use of the concept of the "economic surplus." With the critique of the labor theory of value by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and other early-twentieth-century economists, the literal use of Marx's own notion of surplus value became problematical, dependent as it is on the labor theory of value. Baran, influenced by Maynard Keynes, introduced a concept of economic surplus not tied to labor theory.

The actual surplus is the difference between what the society produces and its actual current consumption. The potential surplus is the difference between a society's actual output and what could be produced, given an improved social organization. Even the actual surplus is hard to measure, given that most econometrics is oriented toward capitalist goals. The potential surplus, as Baran admits, is even more speculative, given its dependence on a model of a non-existent (say genuinely socialist in the Marxian sense) production system.

Baran used the surplus concept to analyze underdeveloped economies (or what are now more optimistically called "developing economies") in his The Political Economy of Growth. Baran with Paul M. Sweezy applied the surplus concept to the contemporary US economy in Monopoly Capital.

Selected bibliography

• "The Political Economy of Underdevelopment" (1952),Manchester School
• The Political Economy of Growth (1957) Monthly Review Press, New York. Review extrract.
• "Marxism and Psychoanalysis" (1960)[ pamphlet] Monthly Review Press
• "The Commitment of the Intellectual" (1961), [pamphlet] Monthly Review Press
• "Reflections on the Cuban Revolution" (1961) [pamphlet] Monthly Review Press
• Monopoly Capital: An essay on the American economic and social order (1966), with Paul Sweezy Monthly Review Press, New York
• The Longer View: Essays toward a critique of political economy (1970)
• The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism (1975)

About Paul Baran

• Bellod Redondo, J. F. (2008); "Monopolio e Irracionalidad: Microfundamentos de la Teoría Baran - Sweezy"; revista Principios - Estudios de Economía Política, pp 65 - 84, nº 10, Fundación Sistema, Madrid.

• Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman, eds, (1965); Paul A. Baran (1910-1964): A Collective Portrait, Monthly Review Press, New York.

External links

• The Neo-Marxian Schools
• Economic Development
• The Commitment of the Intellectual, Paul Baran, Monthly Review, May 1961
• Works by or about Paul A. Baran in libraries (WorldCat catalog)