â Today, Mr. Minsky's view [of economics] is more relevant than ever.â - The New York Times â Indeed, the Minsky moment has become a fashionable catch phrase on Wall Street.â -The Wall Street Journal John Maynard Keynes offers a timely reconsideration of the work of the revered economics icon. Hyman Minsky argues that what most economists consider Keynesian economics is at odds with the major points of Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes and Minsky refuse to ignore pervasive uncertainty. Once uncertainty is given center stage, recurring episodes of financial system crises are all but inescapable. As Robert Barbera notes in a new preface, â Benign economic circumstancesâ ¦invite increasingly aggressive financial market wagers. Innovation in finance is a signature development in a capitalist economy. Once leveraged wagers are in place, small disappointments can have exaggerated consequences.â Thus for Minsky economic calm on Main Street engenders financial system fragility which, in turn, ensures a perpetuation of boom and bust cycles. Minsky colleagues Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and L. Randall Wray write in a new introduction, â We offer this new edition, in the hope that it will contribute to the reformation of economic theory so that it can address the world in which we actually live-the world that was always the topic of Minsky's analysis.â

This study begins with a brief survey of economic thought on the relationship between foreign trade and national power, from the Mercantilists on. Chapter II attempts a systematic theoretical approach to the subject. It first makes clear the fundamental basis of the possible use of foreign trade as an instrument of national power policy. Using well-known concepts of economic analysis, it proceeds to show under what conditions and by means of what policies this instrument is likely to attain its highest efficiency. The principles of power policy thus deduced theoretically are then compared with the actual practices followed by German trading methods in recent years. Toward the end of this chapter the reader will be carried into a detailed discussion of certain problems of the theory of international trade, which are touched upon earlier in the chapter. Chapter III is applied to the historical background of our problem. It gives a survey of the literature on "economic aggression" before and during World War I and brings out the importance of the Paris Economic Conference of the Allies in 1916 for the Versailles Treaty and postwar economic policies. In Chapter IV we review in the light of our theoretical and historical analyses certain safeguards or remedies which could be or have been proposed to prevent the use of foreign trade as an instrument of national power policies. Certain questions raised in Part 1 can be answered in quantitative terms. Part 2 consists, therefore, of an exposition of various trends of international trade in recent years disclosed by statistical analysis. In Chapter V we calculate an index number expressing the extent to which the trade of the large trading nations is or has been directed by preference toward the smaller trading countries. Chapter VI gives index numbers for the degree of concentration of their foreign trade on one or a few big markets or sources of supply. Finally, in Chapter VII we measure the extent to which world trade has been based primarily on an exchange of manufactures against raw materials and foodstuffs. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1945, with an expanded edition published in 1980.

2015 Reprint of 1951 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. First published in 1913 and generally held to be her finest achievement, this volume reveals Luxemburg as a Marxist critical of Karl Marx. It offers a theory of the dynamic development of capitalism which is of continued relevance to contemporary scholarship. Taking Marx as her starting point, she offers an independent and fiercely critical explanation of the economic and political consequences of capitalism in the context of the turbulent times in which she lived, reinterpreting events in the United States, Europe, China, Russia and the British Empire. Most today believe there is no alternative to global capitalism. This book is a timely and forceful statement of an opposing view. Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1870 in Russian Poland. She was murdered in Germany while on way to prison. Contains an introduction by Joan Robinson.

CONTENTS: Introduction - Labour, Necessary product, Surplus Product - Exchange, Commodity, Value - Money, Capital, Surplus-value - The Development of Capital - The Contradictions of Capitalism - Trade - Credit - Money - Agriculture- Reproduction and the Growth of National Income - Periodical Crises - Monopoly Capitalism - Imperialism - The Epoch of Capitalist Decline - The Soviet Economy - The Economy of the Transition Period - Socialist Economy - Origin, Rise and Withering Away of Political Economy- Bibliography - Index

Bearing on fundamental issues of economic theory, history, and public policy, this volume elaborates and goes beyond themes enunciated in W. W. Rostow's previous works. The eight essays presented here are unified by the author's insistence that neo-Keynesian and neoclassical theory are an inadequate basis for economic analysis and policy prescription. Changes in technology and in the supply of energy, food, and raw materials, he contends, must be taken into account. The scale and character of the investments required to respond to these changes link his analysis back to conventional income analysis. Rostow outlines in several contexts the framework for a general, disaggregated theory of production and prices that meets this criterion. The theoretical and historical essays include a review and unification of various long-cycle theories; a formal mathematical model of the Kondratieff cycle; a review of theories relating technology and the price system, including Rostow's own formulation of the appropriate linkage; a lengthy analysis of the pre-1914 relation between money and prices, including a detailed critique of modern monetarist interpretations; and an analysis of the proposition that economic growth assumes an S-shaped path of acceleration and deceleration. The policy essays include an examination of the links between energy-related investment, full employment, and patterns of regional development in the United States; the discussion of an appropriate framework and procedure for North-South international economic negotiations; and the text of a 1965 talk on inflation that touches on the relations among economics, economists, and the performance of societies as a whole.

These lectures contain a masterful summing up of Nicholas Kaldor's critique of the foundations of mainstream economic theory. They provide a very clear account of his theoretical structures on regional differences, primary producers and manufacturers, and on differing market structures and the likely course of prices and quantities in different markets over time. The first four lectures are concerned with theory, history and explanation; the fifth consists of a detailed set of integrated policy proposals.

Isaak Illich Rubin (12 June 1886, Dinaburg, now Latvia - 27 November 1937, Aktobe, now Kazakhstan) was a Soviet Marxian economist. His main work Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. He was executed in 1937 during the course of the Great Purge, but his ideas have since been rehabilitated. Rubin's main work emphasised the importance of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism in the labor theory of value. Against those who counterposed Marx's early interest in alienation with his later economic theory, Rubin argued that Marx's mature economic work represented the culmination of his lifetime project to understand how human creative power is shaped, defined, and limited by social structures, which take on a uniquely "objective" economic form under capitalism. Significantly, Rubin is at pains to argue that simple commodity production is not a historical phenomenon that developed into capitalism, as it is often understood by both Marxists and critics of Marx; rather, it is a theoretical abstraction that explains one aspect of a fully developed capitalist economy. The concept of value, as understood by Rubin, cannot exist without the other elements of a full-blown capitalist economy: money, capital, the existence of a proletariat, and so on. Rubin's work was never reissued in the Soviet Union after 1928, but in 1972 Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was translated into English by Fredy Perlman and Milos Samardzija. This work became a foundation stone of the "value-form" approach to Marxist theory, exemplified by Hans-Georg Backhaus, Chris Arthur, Geert Reuten, and the "Konstanz-Sydney" group (Michael Eldred, Mike Roth, Lucia Kleiber, and Volkbert Roth). In this interpretation of Marx, "it is the development of the forms of exchange that is seen as the prime determinant of the capitalist economy rather than the content regulated by it". Capitalism is here understood as a method of regulating human labor by giving it the social form of an exchangeable commodity (the "value-form"), rather than a disguised or mystified system that is otherwise similar in content to other class-based societies. According to Arthur, the rediscovery of Rubin's "masterly exegesis" was "the most important single influence on the value form approach to Capital". (wikipedia.org)

2014 Reprint of Original 1960 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "Epistemological Problems" is a milestone in Ludwig von Mises' groundbreaking development of praxeology. This important work contains foundational thoughts on his theory of human action, or "logic of action," which forms the "distinctive methodology of the Austrian School... Mises was not only the major architect and elaborator of this methodology, but also the economist who most fully and successfully applied it to the construction of economic theory" (Rothbard). Mises headed the Austrian School, which "celebrates freedom and the individual, rather than determinism and the collective... and explicitly rejects the idea that the natural sciences provide the proper model for economic analysis" (Shenoy et al., Towards a Theoretical Framework, 19, 19n). In establishing the school's epistemological foundations, Mises first began working on the subject in a series of articles published in the 1920s. He "collected and published them in his seminal philosophical and methodological work, "Grundprobleme der Nationalökonimie" in 1933," which was not translated into English until this edition. Here Mises presents "economics from the point of view of the philosophy of science, and the actual economic analysis of value and inconvertible capital." The first chapter of the book, "The Task and Scope of the Science of Human Action," evolved as the core of the system "Mises had been working on for years... He argued that economic laws were true a priori, on a par with the laws of logic and mathematics... [This] remained one of his most controversial tenets," in that it frames economic theory as addressing "acts of the real world, such as the one that human beings make choices. But the facts of this sort cannot be observed... Economics is not an empirical science in this sense, but it is a science nevertheless." To Mises "the epistemology of economics was not just an idle pastime for ivory tower intellectuals. It was of direct practical relevance." "Epistemological Problems" remains fundamental in establishing the "significance of economic calculation for the architecture of economic science." It is his most powerful and comprehensive elaboration of the span of economic science, arguing that errors of socialism, institutional racism, nationalism and other aspects of human society can be seen as a revolt against the distinctive rationality of economic logic and science. A work that "has lost nothing of its importance... Epistemological Problems contains a considerable amount of discussion that cannot be found in any other of his writings... in particular his critical discussion of the works of those thinkers to whom he felt the greatest intellectual affinity and intellectual debt: Carl Menger, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Max Weber" (Hülsmann, Introduction, 2002 edition, 670-671, 948, xxix, lv).

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops' 1983 report, "Ethical Reflections on the Economic Crisis," was an attempt to bring moral and theological structure to the difficulties faced by many Canadians during the economic downturn of the early 1980s. In this short critique, Walter Block makes a strong argument that the report, though composed with the best of intentions, advocates policies which will have effects opposite those intended. Writing always with humor and compassion, Block includes a list of further reading to help his readers to research and draw their own conclusions. About the Author Walter Block earned his PhD in Economics at Columbia University. He is an author, editor, and co-editor of many books which include Defending the Undefendable ; Lexicon of Economic Thought, Economic Freedom of the World 1975-1995 ; Rent Control: Myths and Realities ; Discrimination, Affirmative Action, and Equal Opportunity ; Theology, Third Word Development and Economic Justice ; Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard ; Religion, Economics, and Social Thought ; and Economic Freedom: Toward a Theory of Measurement .Dr. Block has written more than 500 articles for various non-refereed journals, magazines and newspapers, and is a contributor to such journals as The Review of Austrian Economics , Journal of Libertarian Studies , The Journal of Labor Economics , Cultural Dynamics , and the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics . He is currently a professor and chair of economics at Loyola University.