Welfare, Marx and Japan: William J. Baumol and Martin Bronfenbrenner in the History of Economic Thought

I explore the role in the history of economic thought of two important economists of the 20th century, William Baumol and Martin Bronfenbrenner. The first two papers focus on Baumol and his role in the New Welfare Economics debate and as an historian of economic thought. Baumol’s interest for welfare economics was driven by both the cultural environment at the London School of Economics and his dissatisfaction for the status of the discipline. Baumol’s book Welfare Economics and The Theory of the State can be considered an example of crossing tradition works in public economics and an attempt to draw attention to the then neglected problem of externalities in the economic theory. The second research reconstructs the debate on the transformation problem published on the Journal of Economic Literature in 1974 using the unpublished letters between the authors involved with particular focus on Baumol and Samuelson. What emerges is a clash between two different approaches to the history of economic thought. The third paper explores Martin Bronfenbrenner’s views of Japanese economic thought after the Second World War. Although with some imprecisions derived from cultural differences, his papers are an accurate account of the problems and tensions of the Japanese assimilation of Western economics and the reaction of Japanese economists to the profound changes of the society.