Redistributing surplus-value

Dean Baker, like many others in recent years (such as Joseph Stiglitz, Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel, and Paul Krugman), tries to make sense of the “well-documented upward redistribution of income” that has been taking place for the past four decades in terms of rents. What Baker has in mind are four categories or areas of rent: patent and […]

Profits, investment, and surplus-value

Philip Pilkington does a fine job challenging the neoclassical neglect of the explanation of profits. But then he engages in a silly and infuriating diatribe against the Marxian class theory of profits as surplus-value, preferring instead a Keynesian investment theory of profits. Fine. Like many before him, Pilkington attempts to dismiss with a few curt […]

Inflation and the case of the missing profits

Everyone knows that inflation in the United States is increasing. Anyone who has read the news, or for that matter has gone shopping lately. Prices are rising at the fastest rate in decades. The Consumer Price Index rose 8.6 percent in March, which is the highest rate of increase since December 1981 (when it was […]

Folk economics

Mainstream economists have, it seems, discovered the existence of economic ideas outside the official discipline of economics. It took them long enough! But, unfortunately, they don’t treat the topic particularly seriously—certainly not in the way the scholars who pioneered the project of the New Economic Criticism, starting in the mid-1990s, set out to conduct their […]

Class conflict and economics

A funny thing happened on the way to the recovery from the Pandemic Depression: class conflict is back at the core of economics. At least, that’s what Martin Sandau (ht: bn) thinks. I beg to differ. But more on that anon. First, let us give Sandau his due. His argument is that the current labor […]

Marxian economics for the 21st century?

In this post, I continue the draft of sections of my forthcoming book, “Marxian Economics: An Introduction.” This, like the previous four posts (here, here, here, and here), is written to serve as the basis for chapter 1, Marxian Economics Today. The text of this post should pretty much finish up the draft of the first chapter. Is […]

Contemporary relevance of Marxian economics

I’ve just signed a contract with Polity Press to write a new book, “Marxian Economics: An Introduction.” The idea is to publish it in late 2021 or early 2022. My goal is to write a textbook that can fulfill two purposes: first, a stand-alone book for courses that are focused on Marxian economics or survey […]

Modern monetary theory—pandemic edition

Modern Monetary Theorists are having a moment, as governments (many of them run by conservative regimes, such as Donald Trump and the Republicans in the United States) are running gigantic fiscal deficits in order to combat the economic crisis occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic.* This time, with the $2 trillion CARES Act, the U.S. federal […]

Beyond GDP

The idea that GDP numbers don’t tell us a great deal about what is really going on in the world is becoming increasingly widespread. David Leonhardt, in reflecting the emerging view, has argued that GDP doesn’t “track the well-being of most Americans.” Now, we’d expect that someone like socialist Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders would question […]

Changing the subject

From Chile to Lebanon, young people are demonstrating—in street protests and voting booths—that they’ve had enough of being disciplined and punished by the current development model. Last Friday, more than one million people took to the streets in the Chilean capital of Santiago, initially sparked by a sharp rise in Santiago’s metro fares and now […]