NYT: Review of Swing

@Gavin Kostick & all involved

Well done!

@all – fyi

The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (New Edition)
An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy

by John Bellamy Foster

In 1966, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy published Monopoly Capital, a monumental work of economic theory and social criticism that sought to reveal the basic nature of the capitalism of their time. Their theory, and its continuing elaboration by Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, and others in Monthly Review magazine, influenced generations of radical and heterodox economists. They recognized that Marx’s work was unfinished and itself historically conditioned, and that any attempt to understand capitalism as an evolving phenomenon needed to take changing conditions into account. Having observed the rise of giant monopolistic (or oligopolistic) firms in the twentieth century, they put monopoly capital at the center of their analysis, arguing that the rising surplus such firms accumulated—as a result of their pricing power, massive sales efforts, and other factors—could not be profitably invested back into the economy. Absent any “epoch making innovations” like the automobile or vast new increases in military spending, the result was a general trend toward economic stagnation—a condition that persists, and is increasingly apparent, to this day. Their analysis was also extended to issues of imperialism, or “accumulation on a world scale,” overlapping with the path-breaking work of Samir Amin in particular.

John Bellamy Foster is a leading exponent of this theoretical perspective today, continuing in the tradition of Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital. This new edition of his essential work, The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism, is a clear and accessible explication of this outlook, brought up to the present, and incorporating an analysis of recently discovered “lost” chapters from Monopoly Capital and correspondence between Baran and Sweezy. It also discusses Magdoff and Sweezy’s analysis of the financialization of the economy in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, leading up to the Great Financial Crisis of the opening decade of this century. Foster presents and develops the main arguments of monopoly capital theory, examining its key exponents, and addressing its critics in a way that is thoughtful but rigorous, suspicious of dogma but adamant that the deep-seated problems of today’s monopoly-finance capitalism can only truly be solved in the process of overcoming the system itself.

http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb4413/

@ Gavin Kostick

Congrats – a nice bright feather in the cap for yourself and colleagues.

Congrats, Gavin.

I have no place else to put this and the fact that I have no place else to put this is symptomatic of what the link describes: University economics teaching isn’t an education: it’s a £9,000 lobotomy.

That discussion ronan linked to is worth reading – if you are interested in more than an annual cited papers count, that is.

@ ronan

Thanks for the link.
And good man Gavin. Keep it up

also, for anyone interested, that book that p lane recomended recently (the power of innaction) is available on kindle at the min for 1.89 (for limited time etc)
also, congrats to gavin k (of course)

@rf

Good pointer on the Tony Yates post.

Yates got a well deserved kicking in those comments (the piece was a “quasi-theological textual interpretation ” of economics, the suggest course should be titled “Last Minute Attempts to Rescue Mainstream Economics from Its Unavoidable Demise”).

He also seems to have made himself a bit of a punching bag representing the smug incompetence of the new classicals/austerians (which, though it is the school that dare not speak its name, is where he seems to lie.) I feel a small amount of sympathy for him – he is just articulating the position of most of the economics profession who are waiting for the whole inexplicable global financial crisis and prolonged recession thing to blow over so we can return to those self evident truths.

Simon Wren Lesis: Yes, economic policy did fail

I suspect that Wren Lewis is on the same philosophical journey as the Krugmanator where he goes from a reasoned and sympathetic attempt to reconcile new classical economics as it is practised with the stubbornly Keynesian real world to dismissing most of it as useless in policy terms and reactionary in political intent.

I would boil down the Yates analysis to three points:

* Everything is fine in economics (the microfounded parts). It really is. More math, more ratex. Frankly we are suffering from too little orthodoxy.

* The policy choices so far inspired by “mainstream” economic analysis have been the correct ones. We beat inflation real good. Real good.

* Things are so complicated that what seem to be failures of mainstream economic policy and analysis now will probably be acknowledged as the right thing to do in the light of history.

Complacency, denial and conviction. He could be a future head of DG ECFIN.