Introduction – The Work of William J. Baumol: Heterodox Inspirations and Neoclassical Models

There is a growing realization that the once-seemingly monolithic body of neoclassical economics housed much more pluralism than was alleged by both critics and proponents. The work of William Jack Baumol (1922–2017) is a case in point. His early attempts to integrate dynamics into economic theory were inspired by both Joseph Schumpeter and Karl Marx and created an essential and productive tension between the static allocation framework of neoclassical economics and the long-term macro-dynamics of the economy, which interested Baumol most.

Baumol’s parents were self-educated Jewish migrants who had fled Poland, then under Russian rule, to escape the pogroms and political persecution. His father Solomon came from a working-class background, his parents had run a tavern in which he also worked. His mother Lillian Itzkowitz came from an intellectual Jewish family in Lithuania, she had a more temperate and logical mind than his emotional father (Baumol, 1989, p. 209). Solomon Baumol was an ardent communist when he fled to the United States in the 1910s. In New York City, he worked as a grocery shop clerk. When he heard about the communist revolution in Russia, he returned with his family to Europe to join the communist movement. Upon arrival, he was immediately arrested and imprisoned, because the Bolsheviks assumed that he was an American spy. Fortunately, he managed to escape and return to the United States with his wife, and about two years later, their first son William was born, February 22, 1922, in the South Bronx in New York City.¹