Datapedia: a Yellow Brick Roadmap

This note lays out a roadmap to Datapedia: the goal is to share numbers with the same power and ease that the Wiki has delivered for documents. This would transform the quality and usability of economic data. The goal is a system which, by analogy with Wikipedia can establish a world resource for reliable data. The paper discusses a process by which data providers and users can evolve a new set os systems for exchanging, describing and interacting with data to bring this about. The proposal centres on the metadata – additional descriptive data – that is associated with numeric data, and suggests how, in two cases – World GDP and Creative Industry Employment – data could be mapped in such a way that viable Datawiki platforms can be built. The proposal also allows existing communities of users to start reshaping the way they exchange and handle data, to permit, and also to improve existing standards for collaborative use of data. The first step would be Datawiki: an opensource system for recording revisions, changes and sources of data, allowing users to compare different revisions and versions of data with each other. It would be a set of protocols, and simple web tools, to help data researchers pool, compare, scrutinise, and revise datasets from multiple sources. The first step towards Datawiki is Wikidata: rethinking the way that data itself is transmitted between people that collaborate on it a platform-independent standard for exchanging specifically numeric data. I show that the ubiquitous standard for exchanging data – the spreadsheet – is not up to the task of serving as a platform for Datawiki, and assess how alternatives can be developed.Creative Industries; Economic statistics; Datapedia; Wikipedia; Wikidata, wikipedia, creative industries, macroeconomics

Catechism versus pluralism: the heterodox response to the national undergraduate curriculum proposed by the UK Quality Assurance Authority

Paper presented to the 2007 conference of the International Confederation for Pluralism in Economics (ICAPE), June 1-3, Salt Lake City, Utah. This paper was authored by myself following consultations, and submitted collectively by the Association for Heterodox Economics, as a result of a consultation request issued by the QAA (Quality Assurance Authority) for responses to the ‘benchmark’ statement for the subject of economics. The benchmark statement seeks to define what will in future be considered the prescriptive standard for economics undergraduate teaching in the UK and in UK-certified institutions abroad. The QAA is responsible for the maintenance of academic standards in the UK and although a non-governmental body, plays a strong role in transmitting government requirements to the higher education sector. The benchmark thus represents the first attempt in UK history to regulate what is considered ‘good’ teaching in economics. It is a highly neoclassical and orthodox document and, it is argued in the AHE response, entirely lacking in a pluralist perspective. It represents an important landmark in that it sets out the consensus, among orthodox academics, of what the ‘mainstream’ consists of and how it should be taught. The paper presented at this session represents the consensus, highly critical, response of UK heterodox economists and social scientists to the QAA benchmark statement. It also contains a comparison between the economics benchmark and that proposed by other social sciences, which suggests that economics stands in an isolated position in its attempt to define its field of enquiry by means of a strict prescriptive orthodoxy.Economics Teaching, Pluralism, Heterodox EconomicsEconomics Teaching, Pluralism, Heterodox Economics

What makes the US Profit Rate Fall?

Since world war II there have been two quite distinct phases of world growth. In about 1965, a long slowdown set in which has still not ended. Robert Brenner (2002, 2003) has re-ignited the debate about its causes, claiming that nothing in either present or past economic theory explains it. He argues for a ‘third explanation’, alternative both to the profit-share hypothesis which dominates today, and the rising output-capital ratio account associated with Marx and Kalecki. Empirically, the evidence overwhelmingly shows the output-capital ratio is a dominant cause of postwar movements in the US profit rate; thus what Brenner maintains is theoretically impossible, is empirically true. The paper dissects this contradiction which, if economics proceeded scientifically, would lead to a radical critique of its own paradigm, but has instead led it to suppress and ignore the only coherent alternative. The paper shows Brenner’s rejection of the Marx-Kalecki framework arises because his theoretical paradigm, adapted uncritically from his critics, cannot allow for the effect of falling prices on capital stocks. His own ‘third explanation’ is incompatible with this same framework and can be sustained only by understanding it as the mechanism behind, or ultimate cause of, the movement of the output-capital ratio in price terms.crisis, inequality, Brenner, Value, profit rate, long waves, world systems, TSSI, temporalism

Geld (Money)

This is the English language version of the entry on ‘Money’ (‘Geld’) in the ‘Historisch Kritisch Wörterbuch des Marxismus’, a comprehensive dictionary of Marxist terminology being produced as an accompaniment to the Marx-Engels-Gesamt-Arbeite (Marx-Engels collected works), a comprehensive critical edition of the works of Marx and Engels The German-language version is available separately on this site ‘Geld’, entry in Historisch Kritisch Wörterbuch des Marxismus, Band 5: Gegenöffentlichkeit–Hegemonialapparat. Hamburg: Argument-Verlag, ISBN 3-88619-435-3abstract labour, accumulation, bank, banknotes, alienation, commodity fetishism, fictitious capital, finance capital, financial crises, research and presentation, use-value, equilibrium theories, gold, silver, inflation, capital, classical capitalist economy, convertibility, crisis, market, Marx, MEGA, money, neoclassical, production, price of production, productive and unproductive labour, utopian socialism, sraffianism, exchange, exchange value, transformation problem, objectification, value, value-form, law of value, circulation, TSSI, temporalism

The GLA’s interim metro area dataset

This paper reproduces, in citable form and, for scholarly purposes, the report of the same name produced by the author for the Greater London Authority. GLA Economics prepared its interim dataset on the output and population of 35 European cities, for use within the GLA group when London is benchmarked against these cities. The need for this dataset arose because there is no agreed standard, either worldwide or in Europe, for measuring a city, or even for defining where it begins or ends. Existing estimates differ widely. In a previous working paper, we compared estimates of city productivity growth available from three sources, and found that the differences between these sources were greater than between the cities themselves. These differences affected such basic questions as, for example, whether German cities were growing faster, or slower, than British cities. Economic conclusions about cities in Europe, in short, depend on who provides the data. Although a number of international agencies are working on this problem, with whom GLA Economics works closely,at the time of publication no agreed standard exists. The GLA therefore prepared this dataset for its own purposes, as a standard against which to judge others and as the basis for its own decisions.Keywords: City; global city; Functional Urban Region; Larger Urban Zone; Territorial Indicators; Metropolitan Region; pluralism

Value and the foundation of Economic Dynamics

This article constructs time-varying labour value measures free of such restrictions and shows that they call for a radical re-evaluation of this century's debate on value. We exhibit a counter-example to the Okishio theorem in which labour-saving innovation leads to a continuously-falling profit rate, and a dynamic approach to the classical problem of transforming values into prices in which the sum of values is equal to the sum of prices while the sum of profits remains equal to the sum of surplus values. Elsewhere we have exhibited a computer simulation model using these values. A dynamic value measure is thus practical, necessary, and the basis for a general reconstruction of economics.Profit Rate; Okishio Theorem; Marxist economics; Value Theory; TSSI

The Psychopathology of Walrasian Marxism

This text comprises chapter 1 of Marx and non-equilibrium Economics[1]. It specifies a non-equilibrium (temporal) interpretation of Marx’s theory of value which demonstrates a fully consistent transformation of values into prices and reproduces Marx’s tendential law of the falling profit rate. It seeks to explain why this approach to value is inaccessible to consciousness under present social relations, and why resistance to its acceptance has been particularly strong among Marxists. [1] Freeman, A. (1996b) ‘The psychopathology of Walrasian Marxism’, in Freeman, A.. and Carchedi, G. (eds) (1996), Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics, pp1-29. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. ISBN 1 85898 268 5.Temporalism; TSSI; Value; Marx; rate of profit; transformation; non-equilibrium; Walras;