Focusing on recent advancements in capital theory, this book delves into ongoing debates and analyses that shape the field. It explores various perspectives and critiques, providing a comprehensive overview of contemporary discussions and their implications for economic understanding. Through detailed examination, it aims to enhance the reader's grasp of capital theory's evolution and its relevance in current economic contexts.
The book offers a comprehensive and mathematically rigorous exploration of modern classical value theory through spectral analysis of the price-profit-wage system. It rigorously tests the classical theory against empirical data, demonstrating its logical consistency and relevance to key economic policies and multiplier processes. Additionally, it investigates how changes in distributive variables affect relative prices, utilizing actual input-output data from diverse sources to support its theoretical and empirical findings.
1. 1 Introduction This book was born out of our reaction to the way in which the usual texts cover the subject of the history of economic thought. In most of these texts, there is a tendency to emphasize the similarities and differences between all the important economists and form a repository of encyclopedic knowledge where one can study the seemingly important economic ideas. In this book, we argue that it is much more fruitful to focus on the essential ideas of each and every school of economic thought and relate them to present-day problems, than to engage into a sterile discussion of the ideas and the lives of the great economists of the past. Thus, although this book deals with the history of economic thought, it does not necessarily follow a historic (in the sense of the order of presentation) approach, but rather a logical one, that is to say it deals with the social conditions associated with the emergence of a school of economic thought, its evolution, and its contemporary in? uence. One cannot write a book on the history of economic thought without writing separate chapters on the major economists of the past, that is, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and J. M. Keynes. Of course these economists formed schools of economic thought, that is, the classical and the Keynesian.
