Once in a while the world astonishes itself. Anxious incredulity replaces intellectual torpor and a puzzled public strains its antennae in every possible direction, desperately seeking explanations for the causes and nature of what just hit it. 2008 was such a moment. Not only did the financial system collapse, and send the real economy into a tailspin, but it also revealed the great gulf separating economics from a very real capitalism. Modern Political Economics has a single aim: To help readers make sense of how 2008 came about and what the post-2008 world has in store.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part delves into every major economic theory, from Aristotle to the present, with a determination to discover clues of what went wrong in 2008. The main finding is that all economic theory is inherently flawed. Any system of ideas whose purpose is to describe capitalism in mathematical or engineering terms leads to inevitable logical inconsistency; an inherent error that stands between us and a decent grasp of capitalist reality. The only scientific truth about capitalism is its radical indeterminacy, a condition which makes it impossible to use science’s tools (e.g. calculus and statistics) to second-guess it. The second part casts an attentive eye on the post-war era; on the breeding ground of the Crash of 2008. It distinguishes between two major post-war phases: The Global Plan (1947-1971) and the Global Minotaur (1971-2008).
This dynamic new book delves into every major economic theory and maps out meticulously the trajectory that global capitalism followed from post-war almost centrally planned stability, to designed disintegration in the 1970s, to an intentional magnification of unsustainable imbalances in the 1980s and, finally, to the most spectacular privatisation of money in the 1990s and beyond. Modern Political Economics is essential reading for Economics students and anyone seeking a better understanding of the 2008 economic crash.
Author(s): Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi, Nicholas J. Theocarakis
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2011
Language: English
Pages: 530
Front Cover
......Page 1
Modern Political Economics
......Page 3
Copyright Page
......Page 4
Contents......Page 5
List of tables
......Page 7
List of figures
......Page 8
List of boxes
......Page 9
Three authors, three forewords......Page 12
1. Introduction
......Page 16
Book 1: Shades of political economics: seeking clues for 2008 and its aftermath in the economists’ theories
......Page 30
2. Condorcet’s Secret: on the significance of classical political economics today
......Page 31
3. The odd couple: the struggle to square a theory of value with a theory of growth
......Page 44
4. The trouble with humans: the source of radical indeterminacy and the touchstone of value
......Page 65
5. Crises: the laboratory of the future
......Page 92
6. Empires of indifference: Leibniz’s calculus and the ascent of Calvinist political economics (with an addendum by George Krimpas entitled ‘Leibniz and the “invention” of General Equilibrium’)
......Page 129
7. Convulsion: 1929 and its legacy
......Page 191
8. A fatal triumph: 2008’s ancestry in the stirrings of the Cold War
......Page 241
9. A most peculiar failure: the curious mechanism by which neoclassicism’s theoretical failures have been reinforcing their dominance since 1950......Page 264
10. A manifesto for Modern Political Economics: postscript to Book 1
......Page 303
Book 2: Modern political economics: theory in action
......Page 315
11. From the Global Plan to a Global Minotaur: the two distinct phases of post-war US hegemony
......Page 316
12. Crash: 2008 and its legacy (with an addendum by George Krimpas entitled ‘The Recycling Problem in a Currency Union’)
......Page 356
13. A future for hope: postscript to Book 2......Page 455
Notes......Page 470
Bibliography......Page 510
Index......Page 533
