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. In view of their regressive character, I think that the question that needs to be asked is how the discipline was untracked and trivialized from its classical flowering? How did it become marginalized, taking for granted the social structures and dynamics that should be the substance and focal point of its analysis? As John Williams quipped already in 1929 about the practical usefulness of international trade theory, I have often felt like the man who stammered ...

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 United States manages to play both sides of this street). Yet academic orthodoxy treats this as anomalous, side-stepping the two key features of today's economic crisis: the "magic of compound interest" multiplying debts owed by the bottom 90 percent of the population to savers among the top 10 percent, while industrial capitalism is turned into a "tollbooth economy" by privatizing rent-extracting privileges on what used to be the public domain. Academic rationalizers of today's economic policy use ...