Neoclassical economists of the current era frequently pay lip service to Adam Smith's theories to certify the validity of natural-laws-based, laissez-faire policies. However, neoclassical theories are fundamentally disconnected from Adam Smith's notion of value, his understanding of the economic...

This paper argues that despite a growing body of scholarly literature on Sir James Steuart, his theory of history and influence on Marxian political economy has been largely ignored. The approach of this paper is motivated, in part, by Marx's sympathetic treatment of Steuart found in the opening...

A monetary approach that combines Chartalism, Nominalism, and Command origins of monetary systems is often deemed to have emerged only recently, while the Aristotelian approach (Commodity, Metallism, and Market origins of monetary systems) is the only one that existed until the end of the...

This paper begins by defining, and distinguishing between, money and finance, and addresses alternative ways of financing spending. We next examine the role played by financial institutions (e.g., banks) in the provision of finance. The role of government as both regulator of private...

In this paper I first provide an overview of alternative approaches to money, contrasting the orthodox approach, in which money is neutral, at least in the long run; and the Marx-Veblen-Keynes approach, or the monetary theory of production. I then focus in more detail on two main categories: the...

This paper examines the causes and consequences of the current global financial crisis. It largely relies on the work of Hyman Minsky, although analyses by John Kenneth Galbraith and Thorstein Veblen of the causes of the 1930s collapse are used to show similarities between the two crises. K.W....

This paper examines the views of Hyman Minsky and Abba Lerner on the functional finance approach to fiscal policy. It argues that the main principles of functional finance were relatively widely held in the immediate postwar period. However, with the rise of the Phillips curve, the return of the...

The theoretical foundation of inflation targeting was laid out by the Swedish economist Knut Wicksell (1851-1926) in his groundbreaking treatise, Interest and Prices, published originally in German in 1898. Here he proposed price stability as the rule for monetary policy. Today, inflation...

This paper suggests that Clark's views regarding the Keynesian Revolution illuminate some of the limitations of the Keynesian orthodoxy that developed after the war, bringing more institutional detail and a greater preocupation with dynamic analysis. Clark developed the multiplier in dynamic...

Define the riskiness of a gamble as the reciprocal of the absolute risk aversion (ARA) of an individual with constant ARA who is indifferent between taking and not taking that gamble. We characterize this index by axioms, chief among them a “duality” axiom which, roughly speaking, asserts...