This panel explored causes of the Great Recession and the continuing economic sluggishness since the recession’s ended, as well as how the left can respond to this situation. In keeping with the conference theme, panelists addressed what different analyses and theories imply about the kind of socioeconomic change that is called for. Alan Freeman spoke... Read More

NY University, PhD, 1968, Michael Hudson Peshine Smith (1814 – 82) was probably the most sophisticated of the pre-Civil War protectionists. What he attempted was no less a task than to transform protectionist economic thought from a body of disparate and often self-contradictory parts into an integrated doctrine of economic growth, and to develop political... Read More

Renegade Economists interview 05.09.2012 Interview with Professor Michael Hudson by Karl Fitzgerald Listen KF: We welcome to the show Professor Michael Hudson, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the leading Post-Keynesian university in America. It’s been fantastic to see, Michael, that the public profile of UMKC has really taken off with Randall... Read More

Michael Hudson’s new book The Bubble and Beyond has just been released and can be purchased here. Speech given at the Veblen, Capitalism and Possibilities for a Rational Economic Order Conference, Istanbul, Turkey, June 6th, 2012 Simon Patten recalled in 1912 that his generation of American economists – most of whom studied in Germany in... Read More

This is a re-working of my second talk at the Rimini MMT conference, as heard on Guns and Butter. Suppose you were alive back in 1945 and were told about all the new technology that would be invented between then and now: the computers and internet, mobile phones and other consumer electronics, faster and cheaper... Read More

As published in American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 70, No. 4 (October, 2011). *The author acknowledges funding from Prosper Australia for this article. ABSTRACT. Reflecting the Progressive Era’s reform agenda Simon Patten (1852–1922) argued that freeing markets from one source of economic rent (by taxing land rent) would merely leave the surplus to... Read More

I have recently republished my lecture notes on the history of theories of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt [2]. In this book I provide the basis for refuting Samuelson’s factor-price equalization theorem, IMF-World Bank austerity programs, and the purchasing-parity theory of exchange rates. These ideas were lapses back from earlier analysis, whose pedigree I trace.... Read More

neweconomicperspectives There is a seeming riddle in the recent evolution of economic thought. It has become more otherworldly and abstract, more detached from the reality of how economies are running deeper into debt to a financial oligarchy. The global economy itself is polarizing between creditor and debtor nations, financial core and periphery (even as the... Read More

The Michael Hudson Series – Part 4 Economic Rent can be viewed here.

“Whoever enters here must know mathematics.” That was the motto of Plato’s Academy. Emphasizing such abstract ratios as the Pythagorean proportions of musical temperament and the calendrical regularities of the sun, moon and planets, its philosophy used the mathematics of nature to reveal an underlying harmony and order in the universe and hence, in an... Read More

in FTD – Financial Times Deutschland (German edition of FT) Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of US World Dominance Michael Hudson. Pluto Press 2003, 425 Seiten, 32 €, ISBN 074531989 Unser Dollar, euer Problem Wie ein Volkswirt die finanzielle Grundlage der amerikanischen Vorherrschaft erklärt Von Sebastian Dullien Wieder einmal starren Wirtschaftsprognostiker Gebannt auf den... Read More

Some Prefatory Remarks to the N.Y.U. Real Estate Institute discussion, Oct. 25, 2001 Economic theory focuses on labor and capital, yet the largest category of tangible assets is not industrial plant and machinery earning profits, but real estate, and its primary objective is to make capital gains. Most new entries into the Forbes or Fortune... Read More

NYU Real Estate Institute’s Round Table Discussion of Land- and Building-Price Indices A meeting was held at New York University’s Real Estate Institute on October 25 to discuss the virtues and pitfalls of constructing a land-price index to distinguish between land and building values. The Institute’s Associate Dean Ken Patton had invited Michael Hudson and... Read More

2. Why Economies Develop Debt Crises: The Mathematics of Compound Interest The past century’s economic schoolbooks have described a universe running down from entropy. Production is assumed to be plagued by diminishing returns, so that each additional unit of input produces less and less output. Even if technology were recognized to raise the productivity of... Read More

Dr Hudson is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends, New York. He has specialised in national income accounting, the balance of payments and flow of funds analysis for leading Wall Street finance houses. A former economics professor at the New School’s Graduate Faculty, he is the author or editor of... Read More

The Economics of the Future Wagner’s Music of the Future – his “total art work” – sought to integrate music and drama (along with art, dance and poetry). In a similarly broad way, the economics of the future will integrate finance and production, thereby restoring the lost link (as drama had been lost to most... Read More

Contribution to The Other Canon Conference on Production Capitalism vs. Financial Capitalism Oslo, September 3-4, 1998. Our economy is evolving into something different from what most people imagine it to be. The emerging system bears little relation to what academic textbooks describe, to say nothing of what politicians are promising. Today’s problems also are different... Read More

This paper reviews some early technological theories of competitiveness and (what often is left out of account) the obverse side of the coin: economic obsolescence. The implications of technological change, industrial head starts and the causes of economic backwardness were analyzed above all by American economists in the mid-19th century who no longer are well... Read More