William Baumol, a great economist, died on May 4th
A prolific writer and originator of the idea of “cost disease”, he was 95
ON MAY 4th William Baumol, one of the great economists of the 20th century, died. Mr Baumol, who kept working into his 90s, published more than 500 papers across a dazzling array of topics; his best-known work, describing “cost disease”, was essentially a side-project. He was a scholar whose stray thought on a sleepless night could change how people see the world.
This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Embrace the contradictions”
Finance & economics May 13th 2017
- India needs to curb a borrowing spree by its state governments
- The investment- management industry faces a big squeeze
- The EU ponders moving euro clearing from London after Brexit
- Africa’s informal economy is receding faster than Latin America’s
- In China, a TV soap on corruption attracts a mass following
- A new sort of hedge fund relies on crowd-sourcing
- William Baumol, a great economist, died on May 4th
- 2017 Marjorie Deane internship
From the May 13th 2017 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionDiscover more
Could war in the Gulf push oil to $100 a barrel?
Missiles are flying over a region that supplies a third of the world’s crude
How bond investors soured on France
They now regard the euro zone’s second-largest economy as riskier than Spain
Can Andrea Orcel, Europe’s star banker, create a super-bank?
An interview with the boss of UniCredit
Why economic warfare nearly always misses its target
There is no such thing as a strategic commodity
A tonne of public debt is never made public
New research suggests governments routinely hide their borrowing
Xi Jinping’s belated stimulus has reset the mood in Chinese markets
But can the buying frenzy last?