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...
Diverse
Escape Economics Review
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS reviews my book in Escape from Economics. Hudson is totally outside the matrix in which economists imprison themselves. Hudson doesn’t live in the artificial reality of economists or shill for corporations and Wall Street. A person can learn a lot from Hudson. His book, Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (2009) explains...
Krugman's attack on my review of Samuelson
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...
The Lost Science of Classical Political Economy
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 Chicago School's long descent
Asia Times As a graduate of the University of Chicago (1959) and also of its Laboratory School (1955-56), I think my experience there confirms the picture portrayed by Henry Liu in his wonderful essay last week on Milton Friedman and the “Money Matters Controversy”. (See Friedman’s misplaced monument, Sep 5.) My introduction to the...
The Use and Abuse of Mathematical Economics
* 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...
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...
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
