Status Updates From Capitalism: Competition, Co...

Predicts recurrent crises over time and every few decades.

Wages vs. profit and growth in the post-Keynesian dispensation of neoliberalism. When wages are good you pump up the consumer economy but profits are the key to growth and inequality if you crush labor and make more profits some more is available for reinvestment but the staggering inequality leads to top-heavy growth and problems of destabilizing politics.

Keynesian Stimulus works in the short term by pumping up demand with its multiplier effect; it will get you out of a depression like the one in the thirties. It will, however, lower the growth of output in the long term since the amount of profits that gets reinvested in growth is less over time, and you end up with the stagflation that happened in the seventies. Explains the twentieth century pretty well.

Getting into Macroeconomics and Neoclassical vs. Keynesian theory of the business cycle, and what Shaikh explains as the real business cycle of his classical Marxian theory.

International trade and firms exploiting labor across borders.

Interest rates Ann's the tate of profit

More on competition and ptices

Explanation of real competition cst perfect and imperfect competition and the role of regulating capital

Marxist theory on Capital, profit, and labor time.

A long chapter on the development and uses of money. Money's role in the Marxist scheme is as a safe medium of exchange.

A neat little model demonstrating that price per unit output goes down during a shift, and the longer the shift, the lower the marginal price of labor per output. A neat little demonstration of why capitalists like their workers to work long shifts.

The key idea in Shaikh's scheme of aggregate supply and demand is a stochastic process called turbulent gravitation. Individual choices in the market have a statistically noise-like quality to them based on desire and fancy, but aggregate supply and demand curves approach certain tendencies through this noisy process of turbulent gravitation.

Chapter two was on turbulent growth with lots of graphs, including productivity vs. Wages. Productivity has gone up higher and higher, yet wages have stagnated since the Reagan assault on labor.

Chapter one is an introductory chapter and outline of the arguments in the book, covering everything from profits, employment, price setting, competition, Keynesian and Neoclassical economics, and his version of new classical economics based on Smith, Ricardo, and Marx.

This book is a pretty good update on Marx's Capital.

Just started reading.