The chapter on Money in the Grundrisse shows clearly that the presentation of the nature, properties and functions of money is opposed to the monetary theory of Utopian socialism. Marx emphasizes easily that the exchange value spontaneously objectifies itself in a money distinct from the...

This article aims to show the originality and the richness of Smith’s analysis of the dehumanizing effects of the division of labour. First, I find out the origin of his analysis in the debates of civic humanism on the corruption of people’s character in commercial societies. Then I show...

In this paper, we put forward a neo-Kaleckian model of growth and dsitribution. We introduce two different types of public expenditure: government consumption expenditure and public provision of capital; and we study the effects on equilibrium capacity utilisation and growth. Two different cases...

This paper examines the interaction between education, growth and distribution from a classical-Marxian perspective. It first briefly examines classical-Marxian ideas on the relation between education and growth and income distribution. Drawing on these ideas to the extent that they are relevant...

There is a short period, at the eve of the Second World War, where the development of macroeconomic theory pushed imperfect competition to the fore. During this period called by Shackle the ‘years of high theory’, many issues concerning income distribution and the trade cycle were raised....

Kaldor presents his analysis of the distribution as a Keynesian theory. His work is inspired by Keynes’ contributions, in the Treatise on Money, and by Kalecki. However, while Keynes and Kalecki develop analyses of short period, Kaldor studies a long period equilibrium so that the mechanism on...

The redistribution of incomes is a recurrent theme in the works of Wicksell, Hayek and the Stockholm School, which focused on interest-rate misalignments and subsequent imbalances of investment and saving. Distributional issues were also at the centre of the policy concepts that later came to be...

The share of labour income in national product has declined in many advanced economies over the past 30 years or so. However, many economists are still convinced that the wage share remains more or less constant in the long run. This notion of the long-term relative stability of the wage share...

Poverty was an ubiquitous theme in the literature of the beginning of the 19th century, and its analysis shifted from political or charitable perspectives to embrace a young science, namely the political economy. Stendhal’s example shows how political economy had become the only legitimate...

The first generation of Catholic social economists, which also included some moral philosophers, put forward a coherent view of economic problems, according to natural law and to the Gospel of the Catholic Church. They studied the causes of the increasingly unequal distribution of income in the...