The Achievement of Paul Baran

Abstract

A New Deal economist, responsible during the war for planning and controls in key manufacturing industries, Harry Magdoff was later in charge of the Department of Commerce monthly, Survey of Current Business, and Special Assistant to the Secretary of Commerce. He is the author of Production, Employment, and Productivity in 59 Manufacturing Industries, and lecturer in economics at the New School for Social Research. Paul Baran was a social scientist and a Marxist. While economics was his major field of study, his interest in economics and his approach to the study of economic developments were part and parcel of his continuous search for a better understanding of human society: to find out how it operates and how it can be changed for the benefit of man. He found in Marx's studies and thought the most satisfactory explanation of how and why societies change, of the origin and development of capitalist society, and of the transformation of capitalist to socialist society.

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