Classical economists mainly Smith, Ricardo and J.S. Mill abhorred public debts because of their interference with capital accumulation. J.S. Mill in particular envisaged that a rising public debt leads to higher interest rates and falling real wages, a combination which may be consistent with a...

In Albers & Albers (Spring, 2013) we demonstrated that the historic development of U.S. real GNP, 1869-present, may be structured in recurring 14-year periods. A steady-state rate of growth of 3.4969% is thereby calculated, generating an increase in real GNP proportional to the famous “Golden...

Economic discussion of ageing has been largely neoclassical in approach. Ageing has become a specialism within population economics, which is itself a specialism within the neoclassical mainstream. An alternative view has come from authors in sociology and social policy, who have produced their...

After the global financial crisis, hopes were high that there would be a pluralisation of the economics discipline and a boost for heterodox economics that challenged dominant economic models. However, mainstream economics once again proved its enormous resilience and the future of alternatives...

Economics has always had a difficult relationship with literature. Although early economists such as Adam Smith adopted a literary approach, pressures soon emerged to develop formal theory imitating natural sciences. A key aim was to attain scientific status and avoid comparison with literary...

The search for psychological content or support for economic decision-making is a subject that is contemporaneously stressed. Considering Keynesian and Post-Keynesian economics, it is possible to perceive several approaches that reclaim behavioral economics as a psychological support for...

This paper aims to show that economic theory has become ‘desocialised’ and separated from social theory through the adoption of individualistic methods and neglect of social relations and structures. A historical overview traces how the social content of economic theory has diminished,...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical evaluation of neo-Kaleckian supermultiplier and neo-Goodwinian models. The benchmark structuralist and Harrodian neo-Goodwinian models posit a macro economy with only one asset: the capital stock. Demand leakages presuppose that at least one sector...

Academic treatments of distributive justice normally adopt a static approach centred on resource allocation among a set of individual agents. The resulting models, expressed in mathematical language, make no allowance for culture, as they never engage with the society’s way of life or the...

A macroeconomic model can depict employment only if it includes an account of the organisation of production. Keynes and many Keynesian writers have retained a neoclassical view of production, with fixed, technically efficient production functions; such a view is restrictive and neglects the...