Duncan K. Foley
Department of Economics
New School for Social Research
6 East 16th Street
New York, NY 10003
212-229-5717
212-229-5724 (fax)
e-mail: foleyd@newschool.edu
DKF CV including publications with citation information.
These papers are in the Adobe Acrobat ".pdf" format and can be read with Acrobat Reader, which is available free from Adobe.
The Political Economy of Output and Employment 2001--2010
A talk for the INET Bretton Woods conference, April 8--10, 2011. The inclusion of financial and other imputed incomes in GDP accounts flatters measures of U.S. economic growth, and leads to an underestimation of the magnitude of the post-2007 crisis downturn and an overestimate of the extent of the recovery.
The Political Economy of Post-crisis Global Capitalism
A talk for the Chicago Center for Contemporary Thought conference on Global Crisis: Rethinking Economy and Society, December 3--4, 2010.
Lectures on the Foundations of Applied Statistical Inference 1-3 Revised 3/10/2010
Informal lectures on the principle of inverse probability, probability and information theory, and linear regression analysis delivered at the New School, March, 2010. Please treat this material as tentative and subject to revision of results, conclusions, and terminology. This revised version corrects several errors (but probably not all) in the earlier posted version.
Lecture 4 on the Foundations of Applied Statistical Inference 3/24/2010
Informal lecture on the problems of missing data, identification, and time series analysis delivered at the New School, March, 2010. Please treat this material as tentative and subject to revision of results, conclusions, and terminology.
Lecture 5 on the Foundations of Applied Statistical Inference 3/31/2010
Informal lecture on quantum probability and algorithmic information theory delivered at the New School, March, 2010. Please treat this material as tentative and subject to revision of results, conclusions, and terminology.
Lineages of Crisis Economics from the 1930s: Keynes, Hayek, and Schumpeter
The Vice Presidential address to the Eastern Economics Association, Philadelphia, February 27, 2010. The talk reviews the debates of the 1930s over economic crises, their causes and cures, in the work of Keynes, Hayek, and Schumpeter.
Notes on crisis and social change
A short presentation for the Historical Materialism Conference in New York January 14--16, 2010. I question the presumption that economic crisis fosters progressive social change, and argue for the need to conceptualize a left-wing program of economic reorganization as an alternative to capitalism.
The anatomy of financial and economic crisis
The Gildersleeve Lecture at Barnard College, April 17, 2009. The talk investigates the theory of financial and economic crises as a social coordination problem. It discusses the origins of the 2007-8 crises in financial fragility and global structural instability of capital movements and effective demand. The talk ends with suggestions for a new regime for the global economy based on fixed exchange rates, capital movement controls, and political regulation of key prices.
The Economic Fundamentals of Global Warming
If global warming is an economic externality, there is no cost to current generations to correct it.
The Economic-Historical Roots of U.S. Foreign Policy
Discusses the dilemmas of U.S. foreign policy in the context of world inequality and the dismantling of colonial empires.
The Long-Period Method and Marx's Theory of Value
Marx's theory of value is rooted in the long-period method of the classical political economists, and rests on the thought-experiment of the self-organization of a commodity-producing society. The "commodity law of exchange" corresponds to the free mobility of labor when means of production are not appropriated as private property. The "capitalist law of exchange" corresponds to the free mobility of labor and capital when means of production are appropriated as private property. Marx's use of the terms "value", "price of production", "abstract labor", "universal labor", and "money" are reconsidered in this perspective.
Classical thermodynamics and economic general equilibrium theory (by Eric Smith and Duncan K. Foley)
Explores the formal similarities in structure between classical thermodynamics and economic general equilibrium theory, showing their exact equivalence for quasi-linear economies.
An unpublished pep talk to Berkeley graduate students in 1989 discussing personal and collective survival strategies for non-mainstream economists.
Recent developments in economic theory
Social Research 57(3) (Fall, 1990) 665-688. Critical review of developments in nonlinear dynamics, growth theory, and other issues.
Roemer on Marx on exploitation
Economics and Politics 1:2, (July, 1989) 187-199. Review of John Roemer's Free to lose . Explains the differences between Roemer's and Marx's theories of exploitation and argues for the superiority of Marx's when they diverge.
Economics and Philosophy 9 (1993) 297-333. Review of Reconstructing Marxism by Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine and Elliot Sober. Calls for a return to the materialist sources of Marxist theory as a strategy for renewal. Detailed critique of "rational-choice Marxism".
The Economic Journal 104 (September, 1994) 1204-1206. Review of Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy's Economics of the profit rate. Praises the originality and technical quality of the book and wishes for a better treatment of money and finance.
History of Political Economy 27:1 (1995), 159-165. Response to Tony Brewer's evaluation of Marx in HOPE symposium. Marx can take care of himself in the history of ideas.
Review of Marx and Non-equilibrium Economics
Eastern Economic Journal 23(4):493--496, 1997. Finds the evidence for the "single-system" interpretation of Marx's theory of value persuasive, but questions some of the extensions and elaborations of this view.
Social Concept 1(1), 5-19. Reviews Marx's theory of money and the problems of applying it to contemporary monetary institutions. From the vantage point of 1997 I am less confident of the theoretical and practical adequacy of the Keynesian theory of inflation as arising from the pricing decisions of individual firms put forward in this paper than I was in 1983. The general thrust of the rest of the paper still seems correct and relevant to me.
Maximum Entropy Exchange Equilibrium
An early paper on maximum entropy ideas applied to conventional economic exchange models. This paper proves that the entropy prices corresponding to the maximum entropy Pareto-efficient allocation are proportional to the marginal rates of substitution at that equilibrium.
Recent papers
Economic Growth from a Classical Perspective (with Adalmir Marquetti)
This paper, prepared for the International Colloquium at the University of Brasilia in April, 1997, uses Penn World Table data extended to include capital stock estimates for a wider sample to look at broad empirical patterns in economic growth. Strong evidence for the preponderance of "Marx-biased", that is, labor-saving and capital-using, patterns of technical change emerges.
The data on which this paper is based is available for download:
Extended Penn World Tables Data
This paper summarizes the theory of the circuit of capital, explains methods for making the concepts operational, and presents the main results of Piruz Alemi's dissertation research.
Statistical Equilibrium in Economics: Method, Interpretation, and an Example
These notes, prepared for the ISER Summer School in Siena, July 4-11, 1999, are a tutorial on the concept of statistical equilibrium, ending with the study of arbitrage a simple asset market.
Social Security in a Classical Growth Model (with Thomas R. Michl)
This paper applies the Classical growth model of our book, Growth and Distribution, to the analysis of social security systems. In this model the population adapts to the accumulation of capital to maintain a constant real wage (or wage share in the presence of Harrod-neutral technical change). The U.S. social security system appears more solvent under these assumptions, and higher levels of funding are a potentially important vehicle for the class redistribution of wealth.
These notes, prepared for a Rome conference on TSS, address methodological issues raised by the "Temporal Single-System" interpretation of Marx's theory of value.
Classical thermodynamics and economic general equilibrium theory (with Eric Smith)
This paper shows that from a formal point of view economic general equilibrium theory is a version of classical thermodynamics, and investigates the equivalence of the two formalisms in detail. We explain the economic analogue of thermodynamic entropy, and of the Gibbs and Helmholtz potentials of classical thermodynamics.
The Strange History of the Economic Agent
This talk, delivered to the General Seminar of the Graduate Faculty of New School University, sketches the history of the conception of the economic agents whose behavior theoretically constitutes the observed statistical aggregates of macroeconomies.
Rationality and Ideology in Economics
This talk, prepared as a lecture in the World Political Economy course at the Graduate Faculty of New School University, traces the theoretical stagnation of rational-choice economics to its ideological commitment to the Hobbesian-Lockean theory of the social compact.
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