Tag Archives: neoclassical economics

Mainstream neoclassical economics is hooked on the idea of individual worker-savers as prime movers in capitalist market economies. As workers, individuals choose how much to work, determining the economy’s output; as savers, they determine how much of that output takes the shape of the economy’s capital investment. With banks as conduits channeling saving flows into investment, firms churn inputs into outputs that match worker-savers’ tastes. In this way, the neoclassical world gets shaped...

Mainstream neoclassical economics is hooked on the idea of individual worker-savers as prime movers in capitalist market economies. As workers, individuals choose how much to work, determining the economy’s output; as savers, they determine how much of that output takes the shape of the economy’s capital investment. With banks as conduits channeling saving flows into investment, firms churn inputs into outputs that match worker-savers’ tastes. In this way, the neoclassical world gets...

I kid to this previously, but it was in a list of links. It is important enough to give it its own post.Hudson at his best. It's a must-read. Longish, so save it for the weekend if time is an issue.Michael Hudson — On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of Neoliberalism“Creating Wealth” through Debt: The West’s Finance-Capitalist Road— To be delivered at the Peking University, School of Marxist Studies, May 5-6, 2018Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term...

From the beginning, mainstream macroeconomics has been a battleground between the visible and the invisible hand. Keynesian macroeconomics, represented on the left-hand side of the chart above, has an aggregate supply curve with a long horizontal section at levels of output (Y or real GDP) below full employment (Yfe). What this means is that the aggregate demand determines the actual level of output, which can be and often is at less than full employment (e.g., when AD falls from AD1 to...

Must-read in full. It's short and to the point.The meaning of "value" is one of the most pertinent questions in economics and political economy. Michael Hudson has been emphasizing this for some time, as have Marxists and Marxian. Consideration of value of other than as price revealed in competitive markets is ruled out in conventional economics by methodological assumptions. What we value and how we value it is one of the most contested, misunderstood and important ideas in economics....

The divergence of neoclassical economics from classical ideas does not have to do with mathematical formalism. It occurs when Walras and Pareto introduced us to homoeconomicus, a human being who springs fully formed into the world at the age of 18 with a complete understanding of his preferences over every conceivable outcome in his extensive choice set. That step enabled us to understand why markets are better ways of organizing economic activity than any other known form of social...

Mainstream economists refer to it as price theory, everyone else value theory. But whatever it’s called, it’s at the center of economists’ differing explanations of what happens in (and alongside) markets. As I see it, price/value theory serves as the framework to explain a wide range of phenomena, from how and for how much commodities are exchanged in markets through the determinants of the distribution of incomes to the outcomes—for the economy and society as a whole—of the allocation of...

Bad title, which the author corrects in the article. Neoliberalism is a political theory rather than an economic theory. Neoclassical economics is an economic theory. The tile contains a category error. The most important thing to understand is that neoliberalism is a post-war political movement that grew out of the Mont Pelerin Society, a thought collective that formed a consensus not to put the market at the centre of the state, but to take it over completely. Its entire objective is to...

One of the more puzzling aspects of neo-classical economic theory is the assertion that profits are zero in equilibrium under the conditions that are assumed for many models. One should re-interpret this statement as "excess profits" are zero, but there are still some awkward aspects to the treatment of profits in standard macro models. This article works through the theory of profits for an example dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, and discusses the difficulties with the...

These new facts are particularly puzzling from the point of view of the standard neoclassical economic model, in which markets are perfectly competitive. In this view, profits should not persist over the long run, let alone enable the owners of corporations to increase their share of income over time. The standard model, however, cannot address many of the fundamental changes that have occurred in the U.S. economy over the past 40 years.In order to explain these new trends, I and my...