In a recent article, Keen resumes the debate with Krugman about the effects of debt upon the economy. It is hard to see how the question can be settled as long as all participants apply their idiosyncratic models. Hence the issue boils down, as Krugman rightly put it, to the deeper question:...

Efficient progress of the monetary theory of production (MTP) is hampered by an unsatisfactory account of how profit and interest emerge in the monetary circuit. As matter of fact, this question puzzled already the classics. It seems evident that it cannot be answered by applying the usual...

According to prevailing methodological criteria, standard economics is definitively refuted. Joan Robinson’s wake-up call “Scrap the lot and start again” has therefore lost nothing of its original freshness and urgency. Yet, how can the restart succeed? This inquiry builds on structural...

Jevons composed his value theory of nonenties. These creatures are elusive. Subsequent formal refinements did not eliminate the fundamental flaw but made it only harder to detect. A vacuous formal structure is one that cannot be interpreted in some domain. For want of any correspondence in the...

What do economists understand about the economy if they do not understand the profit phenomenon? Next to nothing. Therefore, the very first task in theoretical economics is to clarify the difference between profit and wage income and their respective determinants. It was Ricardo who tackled the...

Economists have the habit of solving the wrong problems. They speculate circumstantially about the behavior of agents and do not come to grips with the behavior of the monetary economy. This is the consequence of the methodological imperative that all explanations must run in terms of the...

Marxian economics and standard economics are widely different yet they share a central weakness: the respective profit theories are demonstrably false – each one in its own characteristic way. Roughly speaking, Marx tried to explain profit by objective factors while standard economics cites...

Axiomatization is the prime task of theoretical economics. Without correct axioms,no correct theory. Without correct theory, no understanding of how the economy works. Without empirically corroborated understanding, no useful economic policy advice. Yet, much more important than any political...

It has long been criticized that history is almost entirely absent from orthodox economics. This deficiency is due to the fact that equilibrium and time make an odd couple. Because equilibrium is one of the crucial hard-core propositions of the research program it cannot be abandoned. This...

For a host of compelling methodological reasons, homo oeconomicus has to be replaced. This is consensus, the open question is how this could be accomplished. What is required first is the separation of the formal foundations into a structural and a behavioral part. This paper introduces the...