Richard D. Wolff
| Richard D. Wolff | |
|---|---|
| Born |
April 1, 1942 Youngstown, Ohio, USA |
| Nationality | United States |
| Spouse(s) | Harriet Fraad |
| Institution |
Yale University (1967-69) City College of New York (1969-73) University of Massachusetts Amherst (1973-present) The New School (2008-present) |
| Field | Marxian economics; Political economy; International affairs |
| School or tradition |
Marxian economics |
| Alma mater |
Harvard College (B.A., 1963) Stanford University (M.A., 1964) Yale University (M.A., M.A., 1966, 1967) Yale University (Ph.D., 1969) |
| Influences | Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels; Eduard Bernstein;Rosa Luxemburg;Vladimir Lenin; Antonio Gramsci;George LukácsPaul Sweezy;Paul A. Baran; Louis Althusser; Étienne Balibar |
| Influenced | Jack Amariglio; Yanis Varoufakis |
| Contributions | Marxian economics; economic methodology; class analysis |
Richard David Wolff (born April 1, 1942) is an American Marxian economist, well known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology, and class analysis. He is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.
In 1988 he co-founded the journal Rethinking Marxism. In 2010, Wolff published Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It, also released as a DVD. He released three new books in 2012: Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism, with David Barsamian (San Francisco: City Lights Books), Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian, with Stephen Resnick (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT University Press), and Democracy at Work (Chicago: Haymarket Books).
Wolff hosts the weekly hour-long radio program Economic Update on WBAI, 99.5 FM, New York City (Pacifica Radio) and is featured regularly in television, print, and internet media. The New York Times Magazine has named him "America's most prominent Marxist economist". Wolff lives in Manhattan with his wife and frequent collaborator, Dr. Harriet Fraad, a practicing psychotherapist.
Richard Wolff's parents were European nationals, who immigrated to the United States during WW II. His father, a French lawyer working until that point in Cologne, got work in Youngstown, Ohio as a steel worker (in part because his European certification was not recognized in the United States), and the family eventually settled outside New York City. His mother was a German citizen. Wolff states that his European background influenced his world view: "[E]verything you expect about how the world works probably will be changed in your life, that unexpected things happen, often tragic things happen, and being flexible, being aware of a whole range of different things that happen in the world, is not just a good idea as a thinking person, but it’s crucial to your survival. So, for me, I grew up convinced that understanding the political and economic environment I lived in was an urgent matter that had to be done, and made me a little different from many of my fellow kids in school who didn’t have that sense of the urgency of understanding how the world worked to be able to navigate an unstable and often dangerous world. That was a very important lesson for me." Wolff's father was acquainted with Max Horkheimer. Wolff earned a BA magna cum laude in history from Harvard in 1963 and moved on to Stanford—he attained a MA in economics in 1964—to study with Paul A. Baran. Baran died prematurely from a heart attack in 1964 and Wolff transferred to Yale University, where he received a MA in economics in 1966, MA in history in 1967, and a PhD in economics in 1969. As a graduate student at Yale, Wolff worked as an instructor. His dissertation, "The Economics of Colonialism: Britain and Kenya", was eventually published in book form in 1974.
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