Tag Archives: Marx

Economic Lessons for 2020: A Conversation with Dr. Michael HudsonPeoples Forum, December 12, 2019. [embedded content] We are facing a crisis of poverty and economic precarity, where 140 million people are poor or low-income, the costs of living are going up and the chances of living are going down. What condition is our economy in today, more than ten years after the Great Recession of 2008, to withstand another economic downturn? What lessons have we learned – or failed...

The new issue of the journal ECONOMIC THOUGHT (Vol 8, No 2, 2019) has just been published. In this issue I have contributed a comment on Miguel Ramirez’s paper, ‘Credit, Indebtedness and Speculation in Marx’s Political Economy’. The issue contains of course the paper by M.Ramirez as well as his reply to my comments. The whole table of contents of the issue is the following: Vol 8, No 2, 2019 Table of contents Hierarchical Inconsistencies: A Critical Assessment of Justification Juozas...

Heterodox economics and economic anthropology: reflections prompted by two books Working paper N. 807 Luglio 2019 Sergio Cesaratto DEPS, USienaAbstract This paper has been long ago inspired by Jared Diamond (1997) and, in particular, by his extensive use of the concept of economic surplus as the key to the development of civilization. Unfortunately, Diamond does not even mention the origin of the concept in classical and pre-classical economics. Moreover, Diamond does not pay...

The theory of value and distribution is at the heart of economics. To be clear, when I say that it is at the center, it means that discussions of almost any topic in economics, in one way or another, depend on a certain theoretical position about the theory of value and distribution. However, most economists have no clue about it, about the centrality of value. Not only they don't understand the original and now infamous labor theory of value (LTV), that dominated between Petty and Ricardo...

Below follow the text and the links for downloading of my contribution title ‘The 4th Industrial Revolution: Myth or Reality?’ at the Workshop organized by Union of Economists of Secondary Education Teachers on 15/2/2019 in Thessaloniki Workshop: ‘The Economy on the Horizon of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’ Thessaloniki, 15/2/19 ‘’ Stavros Mavroudeas Prof. of Political Economy Panteion University e-mail: [email protected]   Abstract The term ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ is...

The other great transformation I have discussed Polanyi on the blog before, but not in great detail (see this video posted a few years back from Fred Block for a more in depth discussion). However, writing about Bob Heilbroner's views of economics, and in particular the labor theory of value, reminded me why I have reservations about Polanyi, something that often surprises my friends, since I often cite some of his ideas, and I did put his book on the Top 10 list.Polanyi has been,...

Pubblichiamo intervista apparsa su Osservatorio globalizzazione Professor Sergio Cesaratto, ordinario nel Dipartimento di Economia Politica e statistica dell’Università degli Studi di Siena, da sempre economista eterodosso e ormai punto di riferimento della divulgazione dell’economia classica in Italia. Ha recentemente pubblicato due importanti libri che hanno avuto molto successo: Chi non rispetta le regole? del 2018 e Sei lezioni di Economia del 2016, dimostrandosi ancora una volta...

Previously I have discussed how Marx’s well known aggregate equalities have been shown to hold under single-system interpretations of his theory of value. In the July 2018 edition of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, there is a noteworthy paper by Ian Wright that reconciles the classical labor theory of value with Marx’s prices of production within a dual-system framework. As with single-system interpretations, Marx’s equalities also hold under Wright’s approach. However, they do so in a...

The Review of Political Economy has done a great service to those interested in political economy, and in particular those concerned with the revival of the surplus approach. It has published the manuscript of Pierangelo Garegnani's unpublished paper.From Fabio Petri's introduction: In the last year of his life, Pierangelo Garegnani (1930–2011) worked on revising a paper on Marx’s labour theory of value drafted 30 years before, which had remained unpublished. This revised paper is what...

Mind blowing stuff A while ago now I discussed technological determinism, and the existence of economic laws, even if not in the same sense that in the so-called hard sciences. This semester I'm teaching a class for first year students (non Econ majors, to clarify for those outside the US) titled somewhat facetiously 'From Fire to Uber.' In fact, the first reading is Heilbroner's 1967 paper discussed in the first link provided above, on whether machines make history.Bob was on the side...