American Marxist economist who devised the concept of economic surplus and wrote Monopoly Capital with Paul Sweezy
Baran was born in Mykolaiv in the Russian Empire into a Jewish Menshevik family. In Germany he was associated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research; he fled after the Nazis took power and emigrated to the United States in 1939. During the Second World War he worked as an economist for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and in 1949 he joined Stanford University, becoming full professor in 1951, virtually the only tenured Marxist economist in the United States. In The Political Economy of Growth (1957) he analysed underdevelopment through the concept of economic surplus, and he helped set the direction of Monthly Review. He died of a heart attack in 1964; Monopoly Capital, finished by Paul Sweezy, appeared in 1966.
Also known as: Paul Alexander Baran
Activities and affiliations
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1942–1945
United States state institutionsEconomist, Office of Strategic Services
Economy, finance and planning -
1949–1964
Stanford UniversityProfessor of Economics, Stanford UniversityMain
Scholarship and theory
Career Timeline
- 1939Emigrated to the United States
- 1949–1964Professor at Stanford University
- 1957The Political Economy of Growth
- 1966Monopoly Capital (posthumous, with Paul Sweezy)