Ben Fine (born 1948) is Professor of Economics at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.
Fine was born in Coventry in 1948. One of six brothers, he and all but one other followed their father and studied mathematics at the University of Oxford. Fine graduated at the age of 20, and then was recruited by Sir James Mirrlees, completing an economics degree. He took his doctorate in economics at the London School of Economics, under the supervision of Amartya Sen, in 1974. [1] He moved to the newly established economics department at Birkbeck, University of London, later working part-time as an industrial economist at the Greater London Council prior to its abolition. He was a member of the Social Science Research Committee of the UK’s Food Standards Agency, that met until 2016. [2] Currently, Ben Fine is emeritus professor of economics at the Department of Economics at SOAS, University of London. He is on the Economists' Oversight Group of the Citizens' Economic Council of the Royal Society of Arts, Commerce and Manufacturing (RSA).
Fine initially worked on social choice theory, which later informed several studies of consumer choice and consumption patterns. He developed the 'systems of production' framework to understand the ways in which goods are produced and consumed, working with E. Leopold. [3] Latterly he turned to understanding labour economics and inequalities in South Africa's extractives sector, based on some earlier work on the British coal industry, which was in decline.
He is the author of a number of works in the broad tradition of Marxist economics, and has made contributions on economic imperialism and critiques of the concept of social capital. Perhaps his most significant book to date is Marx's 'Capital' (6th ed. 2016, first ed. 1975), with Alfredo Saad-Filho. His work is cited over 39,000 times (Google Scholar, 2018) and his books have been translated into thirteen languages.
He has advised UNCTAD, UNDESA, UNDP, UNRISD, and Oxfam and served as an expert advisor on President Nelson Mandela's 1995-1996 South African Labour Market Commission.
Edited Books
Economics is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Keynesian economics are the various macroeconomic theories and models of how aggregate demand strongly influences economic output and inflation. In the Keynesian view, aggregate demand does not necessarily equal the productive capacity of the economy. Instead, it is influenced by a host of factors – sometimes behaving erratically – affecting production, employment, and inflation.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics dealing with performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. For example, using interest rates, taxes, and government spending to regulate an economy’s growth and stability. This includes regional, national, and global economies. According to a 2018 assessment by economists Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson, economic "evidence regarding the consequences of different macroeconomic policies is still highly imperfect and open to serious criticism."
In classical economics, Say's law, or the law of markets, is the claim that the production of a product creates demand for another product by providing something of value which can be exchanged for that other product. So, production is the source of demand. In his principal work, A Treatise on Political Economy, Jean-Baptiste Say wrote: "A product is no sooner created, than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value." And also, "As each of us can only purchase the productions of others with his own productions – as the value we can buy is equal to the value we can produce, the more men can produce, the more they will purchase."
Use value or value in use is a concept in Marxist economics. It refers to the tangible features of a commodity which can satisfy some human requirement, want or need, or which serves a useful purpose. In Karl Marx's critique of political economy, any product has a labor-value and a use-value, and if it is traded as a commodity in markets, it additionally has an exchange value, most often expressed as a money-price.
Labour power is a key concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. Marx distinguished between the capacity to do work, labour power, from the physical act of working, labour. Labour power exists in any kind of society, but on what terms it is traded or combined with means of production to produce goods and services has historically varied greatly.
Heterodox economics is any economics thought or theory that contrasts with orthodox schools of economic thought, or that may be beyond neoclassical economics. These include institutional, evolutionary, feminist, social, post-Keynesian, ecological, Austrian, Marxian, socialist and anarchist economics.
In the history of economic thought, a school of economic thought is a group of economic thinkers who share or shared a common perspective on the way economies work. While economists do not always fit into particular schools, particularly in modern times, classifying economists into schools of thought is common. Economic thought may be roughly divided into three phases: premodern, early modern and modern. Systematic economic theory has been developed mainly since the beginning of what is termed the modern era.
Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order is a 1966 book by the Marxian economists Paul Sweezy and Paul A. Baran. It was published by Monthly Review Press. It made a major contribution to Marxian theory by shifting attention from the assumption of a competitive economy to the monopolistic economy associated with the giant corporations that dominate the modern accumulation process. Their work played a leading role in the intellectual development of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s. As a review in the American Economic Review stated, it represented "the first serious attempt to extend Marx’s model of competitive capitalism to the new conditions of monopoly capitalism." It attracted renewed attention following the Great Recession.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to economics:
Alfredo Saad-Filho is a Brazilian Marxian economist.
John Weeks was an American economist.
Throughout modern history, a variety of perspectives on capitalism have evolved based on different schools of thought.
Duncan K. Foley is an American economist. He is the Leo Model Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Economics at MIT and Stanford, and Professor of Economics at Columbia University. He has held visiting professorships at Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, UC Berkeley, and Dartmouth College, as well as the New School for Social Research.
Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx's critique of political economy. However, unlike critics of political economy, Marxian economists tend to accept the concept of the economy prima facie. Marxian economics comprises several different theories and includes multiple schools of thought, which are sometimes opposed to each other; in many cases Marxian analysis is used to complement, or to supplement, other economic approaches. Because one does not necessarily have to be politically Marxist to be economically Marxian, the two adjectives coexist in usage, rather than being synonymous: They share a semantic field, while also allowing both connotative and denotative differences.
Crisis theory, concerning the causes and consequences of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in a capitalist system, is associated with Marxian critique of political economy, and was further popularised through Marxist economics.
Stavros D. Mavroudeas is a Greek economist working in the tradition of political economy. He is Professor of Political Economy at the Department of Social Policy of Panteion University and was previously Professor of Political Economy at the Department of Economics of the University of Macedonia. Mavroudeas' work in political economy has focused on Marxist political economy, development economics, labour economics, history of economic thought and Greek economic history. He has written on economic crises, Greek macroeconomic policy, growth theory, economics of the European integration, postmodernist economics, regulation approach and radical institutionalist theories.
There are five main lines of scholarly criticism of Marx's idea of the form of value.
Marxism and Keynesianism is a method of understanding and comparing the works of influential economists John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx. Both men's works has fostered respective schools of economic thought that have had significant influence in various academic circles as well as in influencing government policy of various states. Keynes' work found popularity in developed liberal economies following the Great Depression and World War II, most notably Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the United States in which strong industrial production was backed by strong unions and government support. Marx's work, with varying degrees of faithfulness, led the way to a number of socialist states, notably the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The immense influence of both Marxian and Keynesian schools has led to numerous comparisons of the work of both economists along with synthesis of both schools.
A history of economic thought is a book by the Russian economist Isaak Illich Rubin (1886-1937). A second revised edition published in Russian in 1929 was first translated into English by Donald Filtzer and published in 1979. The book covers the period from mercantilism in the 16th century to the decline of the classical school of political economy with writers like John Stuart Mill in the mid-19th century. It critically appraises the theories of major writers, and places their thought in the context of the economic and social changes of their day. It adopts a Marxist standpoint in making critiques, but Marx's work is not itself discussed at any length. The book ends with the state of economics as Marx found it when he first turned to it in the mid-19th century. Rubin's other major work, Essays on Marx's theory of value, takes up Marx's own contributions.
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