Of all the issues which political economy is called on to address, the most insistent, most persistent, and least answered is: why are the poor still with us? This paper develops to the fullest extent the earlier version presented at the 1996 conference of the EEA.
This fragmentary note was written to introduce a functioning though incomplete spreadsheet which aims to illustrate capitalist reproduction. Download Spreadsheet Go
Written for Socialist Action, this was the first paper in which I looked in detail at the empirical evidence that inequality between nations was growing, and caused by neoliberalism. It focussed on the open theoretical crisis of economics, which came to be one of my principal concerns in the following years.
In 1997 I attended a session organised of the ASSA at which Wayne Marr explained the new electronic publishing venture ‘Social Science Research Network’, a key progenitor of the unstoppable Open Access movement and of the ‘Open Peer Review’ system pioneered by the World Economic Association. This paper was a formal writeup of the meeting. A subsequent paper (on this site) presented to the CALECO conference of 1997, formally presented
In 1997, I submitted my paper (published on this site) on an endogenous profit rate cycle to the annual conference of the Royal Economic Society. It was rejected without reasons being given. My experience paralleled that of many other scholars from heterodox economic backgrounds, and initiated the internal crisis in economics that gave rise to the Association for Heterodox Economics, the World Economics Association, and the many organisations grouped around
This paper was originally presented to the 1997 conference of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE). I am publishing it on SSRN in the light of renewed relevance of its critique of the economics profession, and for the historical record, in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and ensuing Great Recession. After siz years of battling the systematic refusal of my fellow-economists to deal scientifically and rationally
This article responds to a number of criticisms of the TSSI of Marx’s theory of value, which at the time was described by scholars as the Sequential Non-dualist approach to the theory of value. It responds in particular to Duncan Foley’s 1997 review of Freeman and Carchedi (eds) Marx and non-equilibrium Economics, and to comments from Fred Moseley in exchanges on the OPE-L discussion list. It deals in particular with
I presented two papers to the 1997 conference of the excellent Radical Statistics journal. This, the second paper, was a whimsical critique of mainstream economics, in the form of a ‘society’ dedicated to protecting the public against Economics. This marks the beginning of my participation in what was to become the Association for Heterodox Economics, founded in 1999 after a highly successful ‘fringe’ conference on the occasion of the 1998
This paper was originally presented to the 1997 conference of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE). I am publishing it on SSRN in the light of renewed relevance of its critique of the economics profession, and for the historical record, in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and ensuing Great Recession. After siz years of battling the systematic refusal of my fellow-economists to deal scientifically and rationally
Submission to the mini-conference of the International Working Group on Value Theory, hosted by the Eastern Economic Association, 1997. This paper can be thought of as a detailed study of the relation between labour and money; more precisely, it examines the concept, due to Alejandro Ramos, of the ‘Monetary Expression of Labour Time’ (MELT).
In 1997 I attended a session organised of the ASSA at which Wayne Marr explained the new electronic publishing venture ‘Social Science Research Network’, a key progenitor of the unstoppable Open Access movement and of the ‘Open Peer Review’ system pioneered by the World Economic Association. It was clear to me, as a software developer, that this innovation was destined to change the world I wrote two papers about it.
This paper proposes a materialist analysis of the theory and practice of academic economics, the body of thought which Marx dubbed the ‘graveyard of economics’. It subjects the claim of the profession to be acting as a science to a rigorous theoretical enquiry, examining both its reaction to the empirical facts of its failures, and the manner in which its theoretical categories express the material interests to which it is
In June 1998 the Brasil Society for Political Economy organised a conference. This took place just before the crash of 1998, and with the devastating effects of the neoliberal decades sweeping the global South. The Brasil Political Economy movement was especially significant for the evolution of value theory: the society was (and remains) the only such national organisation that is constitutionally committed to pluralism, a vital component of the emerging
Version espanhol de ‘A Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of Value’
This paper, published in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe and reproduced in a number of journals and books, examines the consequences for world trade of the restructuring – commonly termed ‘globalisation’ that arose out of the Uruguay round of the GATT and let to the reconstruction of the World Trade Organisation in its present form, beginning in 1982.
This paper was the first attempt I made to bring about a reassessment of the relation between Marx and Keynes, an endeavour I then pursued relentlessly from this time on, and would at times have given up were it not for the even more relentless support of Victoria Chick, and her equally relentless instence that I carry the project through to its conclusion. I take the opportunity of this post
Written jointly with Andrew Kliman, this paper was presented to the Marx International II conference in Paris, 30th September-2nd October 1998. It sets out the principal propositions of the Temporal Single System Interpretation of Marx’s theory of value in a systematic and comprehensive way, making it a reference document of this school of thought. It establishes many theorems that underpin subsequent debates
For reasons of historical interest, this post contains the report which Andrew and I made to the 1999 IWGVT conference. These, crucially, reproduce the ‘IWGVT Rules’, designed to provide for pluralism and engagement. These were to play a formative role in the subsequent evolution of the heterodox economics movement, laying at least part of the foundations for what Andy Denis later called ‘Assertive Pluralism’
This paper is the first published critique of the indeterminacy of price-value correlations and their inadequacy as empirical evidence for the determination of prices by values. It comments on the approach developed by Shaikh, Petrovic, Parys, Ochoa and others, according to which prices, as asserted by Ricardo, are empirically ‘97%’ determined by values. The controversy was subsequently developed in a number of exchanges including, in particular, papers in the Cambridge
This 1999 IWGVT paper drew a line under the debate with ‘Marxism without Marx’ scholarship, and opened a new discussion on the relation between law and contingency. As the new millenium unfolded, this became the gateway to the difficult issue of ‘what difference does conscious human action make?’ It reconnected the Farjoun-Machover ‘econophysics’ literature but differentiated itself from the purely ‘statistical determinist view to be found therein by integrating the
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