On the Career of a Microeconomist

William Baumol

Chapter 9 in Recollections of Eminent Economists, 1989, pp 209-234 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract For as long as I can remember — certainly by my early teens — my desire to be an economist was never in doubt. In retrospect I can see that this was no accident. Both my parents were self-educated immigrants, but educated they were, as few undergraduates are today. Literature, older or current, language, politics and economics were constantly discussed in our house in a most fascinating manner, and I was expected from childhood to participate fully in the discussions. My father with his lower class background (his parents had run a tavern in a small town in Poland) was driven by passionate concern for humanity, and emotion ruled his talk. My mother, by contrast, coming from a line of Jewish Lithuanian intellectuals, epitomised logic and careful reasoning in pursuit of the same objectives. Both parents, particularly my father, were avid Marxists. The combination was irresistible. I was infected by their interests and their concerns. My reading provided a sampling of Marx’s logical convolutions which, combined with tales of the adventure of the buccaneers of nineteenth-century business — Morgan, Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller and others — sealed my fascination with the subject. Well before I entered college I had begun to read economic history, the works of the classical economists and the writings of Thorstein Veblen.

Keywords: Average Cost; Scale Economy; Bell Laboratory; Natural Monopoly; Perfect Competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1989
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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-09776-0_9

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