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I had the honour to be awarded the Marxian Economics Award by the 17th WAPE Forum (2-4 August 2024, Panteion University). The Marxian Economics Award is founded by the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE) to economists of different countries in the world who have made important innovations in the research of theories, methodology and application of Marxist economics. This is the acceptance speech that I delivered in acceptance of the award. [embedded content] View...

from Peter Radford – a critique of the absurdity of economics I finally read “The Accountability Machine”, the book by Dan Davies.  It’s worth the effort.  You can read it in a number of ways.  As a peon to cybernetics and Stafford Beer.  As a critique of the absurdity of economics.  As a summary of the development of management theory.  Or as a summary of the ills of neoliberalism.  It’s a mash-up of all those.  It also has the great virtue of being very readable. Chapter Six will warm...

I have a letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education responding to Steven Teles’ call for more conservative college professors. It’s a shortened version of a longer piece I wrote, which I’m posting here. The fact that conservatives are thin in the humanities and social sciences departments of US college campuses is well known. A natural question, raised by Steven Teles, is whether the rarity of conservative professors in these fields reflects some form of direct or structural...

from Lars Syll Paul Davidson, the co-founder of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (JPKE) and a leading Post Keynesian economist, died on June 20, 2024, in Chicago. He was born in Brooklyn, NY, on October 23, 1930, about a year after the Great Crash of 1929. He was a staunch defender of the importance of John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas, he insisted, differed fundamentally from those of the Neo-Keynesians who came to dominate American macroeconomics after World War II. He viewed...

from Asad Zaman and WEA Pedagogy Blog This is the second post in a sequence explaining post WW2 USA strategies for global dominance. For the previous post, see: Hudson on Super Imperialism 1 U.S. Financial Strategies for Global Dominance  Introduction: Michael Hudson, in his podcast and writings, provides a profound critique of the U.S.’s economic and financial strategies that have underpinned its global dominance. This blog post explores Hudson’s insights into the...

Paul Davidson was a critical figure in the preservation of John Maynard Keynes’s ideas, sticking with them when they were out of fashion. He was also key to the survival of the Post Keynesian school. Davidson endorsed Keynes’s liquidity preference theory of interest, and he emphasized fundamental uncertainty as a central feature of economic reality, […]

An edited version of this ran in The Guardian under the headline “Why aren’t the likes of Rex and Bonza flying high in Australian skies? Ask the politicians”. Here’s my original, a bit more sharply worded. Politicians fly a lot, and mostly enjoy it. So do many of the people they interact with on a daily basis: senior public servants, business leaders, lobbyists and so on. That’s a crucial fact in understanding the mess that is the Australian airline industry.  Politicians in...

real-world economics review Please click here to support this journal and the WEA Issue no. 108July 2024 download whole issue The creationist foundations of Herman Daly’s steady state economyJohn Gowdy and Lisi Krall2 Data: a critical perspectiveCarlos Guerrero de Lizardi16 Enlightenment Epistemology and the Climate CrisisAsad Zaman29 Fabulous MacroeconomicsGerald Holtham33 A Tour of the Jevons Paradox. How Energy Efficiency BackfiresBlair...

from Lars Syll We’ve lots of evidence from different times and places that the elasticity of output with respect to capital is indeed small. In his famous paper which kickstarted this approach to thinking about economic growth, Robert Solow estimated (pdf) that only one-eighth of the increase in US GDP per worker between 1900 and 1949 was due to increases in the capital stock. The rest, he said, was due to technical progress. In Fully Grown, Dietrich Vollrath estimated that from 1950 to...

In a previous post, I analyzed what Canadian corporations are doing with their profits. I described how across almost every sector of the economy, corporations are distributing more of their profits to owners than they are investing. In this brief post, I’m going to describe what Canadian corporations are doing with funds acquired through issuance of debt and equity securities. I will be using StatCan data on corporate issuances of long-term debt and equity. Unfortunately, the data...