William Baumol was one of the participants at a special HOPE conference at Duke University in April 2008 on the Solow growth model, at which Baumol gave a critique of endogenous growth theory (see Annual Supplement to volume 41, 2009). I was one of the reviewers of his paper and I complained that he had been too modest in not referencing his own brilliant critique of growth theory in his The Free-Market Innovation Machine (2002) that certainly deserves to be better known. Baumol subsequently added this footnote for the published version of his paper:
      It was my intention here to minimize references to my own work, but I must confess my weakness in acquiescing instantly to the request of an (anonymous) reviewer that I amplify the discussion by indicating the alternative approaches I have taken to the pertinent issues, particularly in my book The Free-Market Innovation Machine (2002), especially chapters 8, 14 and 15 (the chapters kindly singled out by the reviewer).
Around this time, at one of the annual SHOE conferences, Mark Blaug very confidently predicted to me that Baumol would be the next recipient of the Nobel prize. Sadly this was not to be.
In passing, I would also mention that Baumol corresponded with Lauchlin Currie regarding his paper on “Say’s (at least) Eight Laws…”that Steve Kates has mentioned. It was one influence on Currie’s own insistence on the continuing relevance of classical over Keynesian growth theory and policy.

-        Roger Sandilands



________________________________
From: Societies for the History of Economics [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Steve Kates [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 09, 2017 3:17 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SHOE] Fwd: William Baumol 1922-2017


I had hoped that someone else who had known him better would put up a few words about William Baumol who has just passed away at the age of 95 which is very good going. He truly ought to have won the Nobel Prize, but we here should note his passing since in addition to everything else he did, he was also a great historian of economics, which was to him merely part of his work as an economist, coming from a generation when the separation of HET from economic theory in general was not the gulf it has now become. And it is, no doubt, because of a parallel interest that I am as deeply aware of his work in the way I am. It was at the start of my research into Say's Law back in the 1980s that I was led to read very closely an article written in 1952 by two of the all time greats of economics, William Baumol and Gary Becker, on "The Classical Monetary Theory: The Outcome of the Discussion". And whatever you might conclude from the title, it is an article to a very large extent about Say's Law. And in that article, they crafted what has become the modern sophisticated version of Say's Law which is the division of the concept into Walras' Law, Say's Identity and Say's Equality, with the unsophisticated version being, of course, "supply creates its own demand". While Becker never came back to these issues, Baumol did. In 1977 he published an article on "Say's (at Least) Eight Laws, or What Say and James Mill May Really Have Meant". And this led to my writing to him and eventually meeting with him so this will be in part a personal remembrance.

Both articles were important parts of my thesis, and therefore some time towards the end of the 1980s I wrote an article of my own critical on his explanation of Say's Law. My supervisor then said that I should send Baumol a copy before I sent it off for publication which I did. And then - and this was the most surprising thing to me - I received an exceptionally nice reply to say that he had enjoyed my article but didn't think I had actually understood him correctly. The details are now completely gone of what and why, and there is no doubt that I still do not agree with the Becker and Baumol conclusion, but I also agreed with Baumol that whatever I had been saying in my article at the time was not accurate. So I thanked him for his interest and didn't even try to publish the article. But time passed and he eventually became part of a symposium I organised for The Eastern Economic Journal in 1997, and with his interest rekindled wrote two other articles, one for The Journal of Economic Perspectives in 1999 and the second a retrospective on Say's Law that he contributed to a collection I edited in 2003.

I eventually did meet him personally and the impression that I had formed from our correspondence - that he was a kind, good natured and sweet individual, as well as being as sharp, tough-minded about his own beliefs and analytical as one might wish - was more than confirmed in the hour he gave me of his time. And by then, he would have been in no doubt how opposite I was to pretty well everything he thought about macroeconomic theory and Say's Law. He was nevertheless everything one could have hoped him to be both as an academic and a human being. I therefore wish to have it noted among us the passing of one of the most influential historians of economics of our time.


--
Steven Kates
Associate Professor
School of Economics, Finance and Marketing
RMIT University
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Melbourne Victoria
Australia 3000

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