Archive of papers
Bernard C.Beaudreau
The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933 called for a radical reorganization of U.S. industry, substantial wage increases, workers’ right to bargain collectively as well as unprecedented government works projects. In a letter to President Roosevelt, British economist John …
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Posted for review 29 Apr 2016
Unpublished
Brian O’ Boyle, Terrence McDonough
This paper challenges Tony Lawson’s account of the relationship between mainstream economics and ideology along two key axes. First off, we argue that Newtonian physics has been the primary version of pro-science ideology within mainstream economics, rather than mathematics per …
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Posted for review 18 Feb 2016
Published
Bruna Bruno, Marisa Faggini, Anna Parziale
The crisis happened in the world in the last years, describing a whole of interdependencies and interactions, highlighted the theory’s fundamental flaws of neoclassical economic theory: its unedifying focus on prediction and, above all, its inability to explain how the …
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Posted for review 18 Feb 2016
Published
David Orrell
The answer to the question ‘what is money?’ has changed throughout history. During the gold standard era, money was seen as gold or silver (the theory known as bullionism). In the early 20th century, the alternative theory known as chartalism …
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Posted for review 18 Feb 2016
Published
Ron Wallace
Economics has largely failed to predict global financial crises. In an increasingly globalized world, the consequences of that failure are likely to become more severe. The present article attributes much of economics’ malaise to the traditional and continuing use of …
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Posted for review 11 Jan 2016
Published
Michael Margolis
Graphing causal models while reading econometric papers can make it easy to understand assumptions that are vague in prose and to isolate those assumptions that are crucial to believe the main causal claims. The method is here illustrated with a …
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Posted for review 1 Dec 2015
Published
Asad Zaman
Polanyi’s book on The Great Transformation provides an analysis of the emergence and significance of capitalist economic structures which differs radically from those currently universally taught in economic textbooks. This analysis is based on a methodological approach which is also …
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Posted for review 15 Oct 2015
Published
David Ellerman
After Marx, dissenting economics almost always used “the labor theory” as a theory of value. This paper develops a modern treatment of the alternative labor theory of property that is essentially the property theoretic application of the juridical principle of …
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Posted for review 6 Jul 2015
Published
Hee-Young Shin
This paper traces a historical origin of the idea that the state (government) can and should implement a series of industrial policies to nurture domestic infant industries, in order to show how this economic theory sheds new light on contemporary …
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Posted for review 16 Apr 2015
Unpublished
Patrizio Lainà
Full-reserve banking, which prohibits private money creation, has not been implemented since the 19th century. Thereafter, bank deposits became the dominant means of payment and have retained their position until today. The specific contribution of this paper is to provide …
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Posted for review 16 Apr 2015
Published
M. Shahid Alam
A review of economic thought in Western Europe since the 15th century reveals two streams of economic thought: interventionist and laissez fairist. The mercantilists saw commodities as complex entities with multiple attributes, some of which are more growth-enhancing than others. …
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Posted for review 27 Mar 2015
Published
Diana Andrada Filip & Cyrille Piatecki
The double-entry bookkeeping promoted by Luca Pacioli in the fifteenth century could be considered a strong argument in behalf of the multiplicative calculus which can be developed from the Grossman and Katz non-newtonian calculus concept provided that one goes from …
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Posted for review 16 Feb 2015
Unpublished
Ajit Sinha
Sraffa’s book (1960), Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, is perhaps the most enigmatic theoretical work ever published in economic theory. Of course, all classics are somewhat puzzling and do give rise to a number of interpretations over a …
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Posted for review 7 Nov 2014
Published
Scott Scheall
The present essay investigates the development of F.A. Hayek’s thought concerning industrial fluctuations from the perspective of his methodology of sciences of complex phenomena and concludes that – to the extent this evolution is representative of Hayek’s more general ‘epistemic …
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Posted for review 24 Oct 2014
Published
Florence Gauthier
Among the important works of Edward Palmer Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” published in 1971 occupies an especially important place. He severely critiqued the historiography of his era, because it no longer saw …
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Posted for review 1 Aug 2014
Published
David Ellerman
Liberal thought (in the sense of classical liberalism) is based on the juxtaposition of consent to coercion. Autocracy and slavery were seen as based on coercion whereas today’s political democracy and economic “employment system” are based on consent to voluntary …
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Posted for review 23 Jul 2014
Peter H. Bent
One of the main economic debates taking place in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America was between supporters of protectionism and advocates of free trade policies. Protectionists won this debate, as the 1897 Dingley Tariff raised tariff rates to …
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Posted for review 23 Jul 2014
Published
Manuel Wörsdörfer
The paper gives an overview of primate research and the economic-ethical lessons we can derive from it. In particular, it examines the complex, multi-faceted, and partially conflicting nature of (non-)human primates. Our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, are …
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Posted for review 7 Jul 2014
Gavin Kennedy
I offer a comment on a paper by Prof David Andrews, ‘Adam Smith’s Natural Prices, the Gravitation Metaphor, and the Purposes of Nature’, 2014, published in Economic Thought, 3.1, pp. 42-55, which takes a philosophical view of Adam Smith’s use …
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Posted for review 20 Jun 2014
Published
Alexander Tobon and Nicolas Barbaroux
Following the recent debates in the New Neoclassical Synthesis, the theory of monetary policy had been renewed. The method that prevails, illustrated by Woodford’s Interest and Prices, is a Dynamic General Stochastic Equilibrium Model (DGSE) in which the old LM …
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Posted for review 21 Jan 2014