Poland has produced two of the greatest economists of the past century, namely Michal Kalecki and Oskar Lange. Both worked with a wide and penetrating view of the economy and society, more typical of the great classical economists than of …
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Posted for review 14 Jun 2016
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Jamie Morgan’s commentary (Morgan, 2016) on my paper ‘The Labour Theory of Property and Marginal Productivity Theory (Ellerman, 2016) largely focuses on a number of dogs that didn’t bark in the paper. My focus on the root institution of the …
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Posted for review 29 Apr 2016
Published
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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Unpublished
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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