In this slim, insightful volume, noted economist Samir Amin returns to the core of Marxian economic thought: Marx’s theory of value. He begins with the same question that Marx, along with the classical economists, once pondered: how can every commodity, including labor power, sell at its value on the market and still produce a profit for owners of capital? While bourgeois economists attempted to answer this question according to the categories of capitalist society itself, Marx sought to peer through the surface phenomena of market transactions and develop his theory by examining the actual social relations they obscured. The debate over Marx’s conclusions continues to this day. Amin defends Marx’s theory of value against its critics and also tackles some of its trickier aspects. He examines the relationship between Marx’s abstract concepts—such as “socially necessary labor time”—and how they are manifested in the capitalist marketplace as prices, wages, rents, and so on. He also explains how variations in price are affected by the development of “monopoly- capitalism,” the abandonment of the gold standard, and the deepening of capitalism as a global system. Amin extends Marx’s theory and applies it to capitalism’s current trajectory in a way that is unencumbered by the weight of orthodoxy and unafraid of its own radical conclusions.

Recent events in international financial markets have revived the scientific interest in conceivable institutional alternatives to prevailing monetary arrangements. In the essays reprinted in this book, the author critically examines some of the more influential arguments which have been made in favour of decentralization in banking.

This collection of twelve essays is based on the premise that a better understanding of the economic development process can be gained by studying the history of those countries that have experienced long-term economic success, in this case the United States during the nineteenth century - that period of U.S. history most pertinent to less developed countries. Two of its contributors, Robert W. Fogel and Douglass North, received the 1993 Nobel Prize for Economics. The essays explore in great detail how the U.S. economy persisted on its upward trajectory in spite of perilous times and events and occasional political crises. They show how complex the experience was, how fluid and fragile the process can be. While the specifics of the American case will not be found everywhere, the complexity and fragility are common to all developing countries. The book is in three parts. The first set of essays deals with the meaning and measurement of economic growth and development: economic growth during the antebellum period; the long-term behavior of such financial variables as stock and bond yields and the savings rate; immigration to the United States during the 1850's; and the juxtaposition of economic history and development. The second group of essays examines the influence of institutional changes on American economic growth: the importance of ideas, ideologies, and institutions in sustaining growth; seasonality in labor markets; risk sharing, crew quality, labor shares, and wages in the whaling industry; and capital formation in midwest farms and industries. The essays of the third section analyze events in the political economy of U.S. development: the role of economic issues in the political realignment that led to the election of Abraham Lincoln; the effect of the Civil War on the economic fortunes of Philadelphia's entrepreneurs; the effect of the silver movement on price stability; and the growth and triumph of oligopoly

This essay outlines the evolutionary research agenda thoroughly explored in its microeconomic aspects in the forthcoming Manual, The Foundations of Complex Evolving Economies. Part One: Innovation, Organization and Industrial Dynamics, Oxford University Press, 2023. But is there an ''evolutionary paradigm'', in the first place? And if yes, what is it? In brief, in such a paradigm, the economy is interpreted as a complex evolving system. In that, a wide set of techno-economic phenomena are understood as emergent properties - outcomes of far-from-equilibrium interactions among heterogeneous agents - characterized by endogenous preferences, most often ''boundedly rational'' - but always capable of learning, adapting, and innovating with respect to their understandings of the world in which they operate, the technologies they master, their organizational forms, and their behavioral repertoires. All that involves some crucial properties. First, if the entities are genuinely evolving, new elements, new technologies, new organizational forms, new patterns of interaction are bound to appear along the course of evolution. Second, evolution is a multi-scale phenomenon. This is a fundamental property of biological evolution, and even more so is the evolution of economies and whole societies, nested in different institutions - possibly evolving at different paces, and coupled with technological and organizational changes. Third, but relatedly, economies are complex interactive systems. Interaction generally implies emergence. There is no isomorphism between macroscopic phenomena, say, the dynamics of industries, markets, and whole economies, on the one hand, and the behaviours of individual entities, on the other. More is different (Anderson, 1972). Fourth, complexity is intimately linked with non-linearities, and thus multiple possible dynamical paths. History counts. And this, even more so, in socio-economic environments characterized by knowledge accumulation. Knowledge builds upon itself, thus involving what economists in their jargon call dynamic increasing returns. As summarized in this essays Part One of the Manual addresses in the foregoing perspective, (i) Innovation and technological evolution; (ii) The theory of the firm in evolving environments; (iii) The formalization of learning processes; (iv) the theory of production; (v) consumption patterns; (vi) economic interactions and the working of markets; and, (vii) The ensuing structures and evolution of industries. Further in this essay we sketch some fundamental topics of the macroeconomic and developmental research ahead, which we mean to explore in Part Two of the Manual, in progress. At the same time the reader is warned against multiple risks of ''normalization'' by which 'evolution' is reduced to sheer 'innovation', and the latter is handled by standard econometric instruments, which are inevitably bound to largely neglect, among other features, the emergence of novelty, coupled dynamics, profound heterogeneities at all levels, and various forms of complementarities.

This first volume in a three-volume exposition of Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics" explores a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. This is the first volume in a three-volume exposition of Martin Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics"--a term he coined in 1959 to describe the theoretical underpinnings needed for the construction of an economic dynamics. The goal is to develop a process-oriented theory of money and financial institutions that reconciles micro- and macroeconomics, using as a prime tool the theory of games in strategic and extensive form. The approach involves a search for minimal financial institutions that appear as a logical, technological, and institutional necessity, as part of the "rules of the game." Money and financial institutions are assumed to be the basic elements of the network that transmits the sociopolitical imperatives to the economy. Volume 1 deals with a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. Volume 2 explores the new economic features that arise when we consider multi-period finite and infinite horizon economies. Volume 3 will consider the specific role of financial institutions and government, and formulate the economic financial control problem linking micro- and macroeconomics.

One of Sigmund Freud's most insightful works on the topic of the subconscious, this ground-breaking volume explores the complicated interactions of three elements of the psyche: id, ego, and superego.