…cryptic footnote in Volume I of Capital. Engels acclaimed the pamphlet as “but the farthest outpost of an entire literature which in the twenties turned the Ricardian theory of value…

…is important.  Economic theory might suggest wage subsidies or some other alternative for helping low-income people, but we live in democracy, not an economic theory seminar.  And just as the…

…use of planned obsolescence, I discussed how Thorstein Veblen’s analysis of concepts of conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste, and invidious comparison relied on the “Four Stages Theory” that David Graeber and…

…hybrid of Russian evolutionary theory and anarchist thought. It is, specifically, an idea associated with Peter Kropotkin – a well-known anarchist-socialist thinker – also a naturalist, geographer, ethnographer and advocate of scientific…

According to one well-known theory of electoral competition, voters care about policies, and candidates pick policies to maximize their appeal to voters.  This suggests that campaigns will try to appeal…

…one another. Psychology wasn’t like physics, or even economics. It lacked a single persuasive theory to organize itself around…Part of the problem was the wild diversity of the people who…

…debunked, racially-charged conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States; his 2016 accusation that Mexican immigrants were criminals and “rapists;” his 2017 “Muslim ban;” his “fine…

…expectations. … But bear in mind what we’ve actually seen in academic economics: the development of an ethos in which only microfounded models are considered “real” theory, in which it’s…

…dismissed the PIH (well before it re-emerged) as follows when discussing consumption in Chapter 8 of The General Theory … (6) Changes in expectations of the relation between the present…

John Quiggin finally makes explicit What Everyone Knows: that the clusterfuck that has been made of Macroeconomics is due largely to an attempt to leverage (insufficiently robust) Microeconomic Theory: the…