* I thank Hans Maks and Peter Senn for their helpful suggestions that I have incorporated into this paper. – “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Hamlet, Act I, scene v) Content Mathematical economics as tunnel vision The semantics of mathematical equilibrium theory The...
Articles
How Russia May Create a More Viable Financial and Fiscal System
English translation of a pamphlet published in Russia by The Land Policy Association, St. Petersburg, Russia, April 1999 Instead of becoming wealthier and more like America since 1990, Russia is being turned into a third world country. In less than a decade the nation has been stripped of its capital and forced into debt...
From Sacred Enclave to Temple to City
On the origins of cities as offshore banking centers – chapter 3 from my Urbanization volume, Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (ed. with Baruch Levine) Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 1999 The social sciences have long viewed the earliest cities as playing much the same role as they do...
Financial Capitalism v. Industrial Capitalism
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...
Theories of Economic Obsolescence, Revisited
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...
The Lost Tradition of Biblical Debt Cancellations
This article can be downloaded from here.
Did the Phoenicians Introduce the Idea of Interest to Greece and Italy – and if so When?
(from the Temples of Enterprise book in progress) Delivered at a symposium at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, March 15th-16th, 1990, this article was published in Gunter Kopcke and Isabelle Tokumaru, eds, Greece between East and West: 10th – 8th Centuries BC (Mainz: Verlag Phillip von Zabern, 1992). This paper seeks...
Does Economics Deserve a Nobel Prize? (And. by the way, does Samuelson deserve one?)
In Commonweal, Vol. 93 (Dec. 18, 1970) pp. 296-98 It is bad enough that the field of psychology has for so long been a non-social science, viewing the motive forces of personality as deriving from internal psychic experiences rather than from man’s interaction with his social setting. Similarly in the field of economics: since...
Books by Michael Hudson
