Paul A. Baran

Paul Alexander Baran
Economist Paul A. Baran as he appeared in the late 1950s.
Born	25 August 1909 Mykolaiv,Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine)
Died	26 March 1964(1964-03-26) (aged 54) Palo Alto, California, USA
Nationality	American
Field	Macroeconomics
School or tradition	Neo-Marxian economics
Influences	Karl Marx, Michał Kalecki, Josef Steindl, John Kenneth Galbraith
Influenced	Immanuel Wallerstein, Richard D. Wolff

Paul Alexander Baran (/ˈbærən/; 25 August 1909 – 26 March 1964) was an American Marxist economist. 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.

Baran was born in Imperial Russia. His father, a Menshevik, left Russia 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 in 1928 accepting an appointment as an assistant on agricultural research with his advisor, Dr. Friedrich Pollock. Baran remained in Germany associated with the Frankfurt School Institute for Social Research. He received the Diplom-Volkswirt (graduate degree in political economy, equivalent to a master's degree) in 1931 from the Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Breslau. He next wrote a dissertation under Emil Lederer on economic planning, and received his PhD from the University of Berlin in 1933. During these years in Germany, 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."