Search results

This article delves into the contributions of Milton Santos (1926–2001) to the economic study of entrepreneurship. Santos made contributions to spatial economics, urbanization, and planning theories, being an important author to the field of regional and urban economics. His most famous idea is the “two circuits” of the urban economy. According to this approach, the urban economies in peripheral countries create two economic-urban circuits that are both distinct and connected. The superior circuit comes from the technological modernization and cultivates international relationships. High-value goods and networks and new technologies circulate through it. The inferior circuit works outside these networks. It consists of low-dimension activities from local populations. Santos elaborated this theory to understand urbanization in peripheral countries and to give voice to the ones left behind by the development process. He did not write directly on entrepreneurship. We argue, however, that his thoughts can be important to entrepreneurship studies. The entrepreneurship discourse, that had in Schumpeter one of its main sources, assumes that the entrepreneur has traits related to the superior circuit, such as access to resources and networks, which would not be available to entrepreneurs in the inferior circuit. We argue that Santos’ contributions can inform economic thought in entrepreneurship by calling attention to how literature can approach structural problems and contribute to making economics a more diverse discipline.

Rosa Luxemburg is not an under-consumptionist stressing the tendency to stagnation, it is rather an under-investment perspective: the effective demand crisis results from the disequilibria determined by a vibrant capitalist accumulation, and stems from production rather than circulation. To show this, the chapter deals with three dimensions of Rosa Luxemburg's economic thought. First, how Luxemburg's approach in her 1913 book is related with some of her prior writings, especially Social Reform or Revolution? and the Introduction to Political Economy. Second, the re-reading that Luxemburg herself provided of her own argument in terms of a macro-monetary circuit model like the one we read in her Anti-Critique. Third and last, in which sense Marx's monetary labour theory of value was for her the essential starting point, which cannot be just set aside. This last point will be preceded by a détour, the critical consideration of some key papers by Kalecki on capitalism and reform, including his late paper with Kowalik on the ‘crucial reform’. The chapter concludes with some hints pointing towards an interpretation of capitalism and its recurring crises where exploitation and effective demand are both essential in accounting for the ascent and collapses of different forms of capitalism itself.

The theory of the monetary circuit, as developed in its most powerful form by Graziani (1989), has made a significant contribution to the analysis of credit money in Marxian economics. A key issue is the extent to which circuit theory fails to take into account the relationship between sectors producing capital and consumption goods. In Marx’s reproduction schema, how much money do capitalists need to advance in order for exchange between sectors to balance, and for the circuit to be closed? The purpose of this paper is to address this issue by examining different models of the monetary circuit, each of which has a textual grounding in Marx’s often contradictory musings in Capital, Volume 2.

Alongside alternative conceptions of the circuit of money, different interpretations exist about the role of the multiplier, which can be nested in Marx’s reproduction schema. The problem, from a Marxian point of view, is that in the existing literature investment is usually confined to the capital goods sector. It can be argued that Marx, for the most part, viewed investment as involving accumulation in both departments of production. Using a multiplier framework, derived from input-output technology, this wider treatment of investment is considered as an alternative way of modelling the circulation of money. In addition to contributing to Marxian analysis of the money circuit, this approach could also be more accessible to a wider Post Keynesian audience, since a scalar Keynesian multiplier is employed.

Kalecki's 1968 paper on Marx's Reproduction Schemes aimed, starting from Marxian Schemes, to build an analytical bridge to the modern theories of Effective Demand and Growth. Kalecki accomplished his task modifying the structure of Marxian Schemes, reinterpreting them in terms of vertically integrated sectors, and this sidesteps Marx's analysis of the monetary intersectoral transaction. This chapter tries to show that the impossibility of implementing the intersectoral monetary transaction is not simply due to monetary technicalities, as held by Kalecki, but has crucial implications regarding Say's Law. Putting aside Marx's problem, Kalecki puts aside the true meaning of Marx's unsuccessful analysis: that an economy obeying Say's Law cannot function; as it were, Marx's Impossibility Theorem on Say's Law.

The welcomed introduction of Fred Moseley to a 27-page excerpt from Marx's Economic Manuscript of 1867–1868 draws attention to the influence of turnover times on the formation of prices of production. This chapter discusses the profit-adjustment decomposition outlined by Marx in these pages where he tries to distinguish the influences of turnover time and capital composition on the formation of the prices of production. It provides an alternative decomposition based on Marx's analysis in the second volume of Capital and argues that these pages do not support Moseley's claim that prices of production are intended only to describe a long-run equilibrium condition. It therefore suggests considering the profit adjustment in relation to the dynamic formation of the general rate of profit throughout the equalization process.

The corporate food regime is presented here as a vector of the project of global development. As such, it expresses not only the social and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but also the world-historical conjuncture in which the deployment of price and credit relations are key mechanisms of ‘accumulation through dispossession.’ The global displacement of peasant cultures of provision by dumping, the supermarket revolution, and conversion of land for agro-exports, incubate ‘food sovereignty’ movements expressing alternative relationships to the land, farming and food.

Some cycle routes have proved unpopular because at several points a cyclist has to stop or slow very appreciably. Cyclists are discouraged by the resulting extra journey time. Three alternative hypotheses are made for a cyclist's performance in response to an imposed stop. In all he brakes uniformly from a cruising speed. In one, this speed is a personal standard, and he accelerates uniformly to regain it. In the second, because his energy is used in accelerating, he has less to use in cruising. The third hypothesis is that a cyclist's power output in accelerating is the same as in cruising, except at very low speeds, so that he attains his normal cruising speed asymptotically.

Trials were conducted on a lightly trafficked 2.5-km circuit with seven roundabouts. Cyclists made at least two circuits each, one non-stop and one stopping at roundabouts. Pairs of times for each cyclist were compared with derivations from each hypothesis. It was found that the estimates derived from the second hypothesis were much closer to the trial times than those given by the others. The conclusion is that making an adult cyclist stop is equivalent to extending the journey time by as much as an extra 50 m, approximately, would take. In reckoning the lengths of routes in order to select one for development, an equivalent distance of about 50 m should be added for each stop or near stop, unless they are close together.

There are two influential interpretative positions in the current debate on the crisis among Marxists. The first understands financialization as a consequence of the tendential fall of the rate of profit. The other interpretation, prevalent among those influenced by Keynesianism and Neoricardianism, refers to the tendency toward the crisis of realisation, because of the squeeze on the wage bill and the insufficiency of consumer demand. In both cases, the current crisis is the crisis of a feeble capitalism, permanently stagnationist. A Marxian interpretation of the crisis cannot be separated from the tendential fall of the rate of profit. This latter, however, cannot be accepted as it is presented by Marx, and it must be rethought as a meta-theory of the crisis, including within it the different crisis theories that can be derived from Capital. This article first provides a personal survey of Marx's crisis theories, often presented as opposed to each other. Second, it seeks to integrate the different positions into a unitary discourse, within a nonmechanical reading of the fall of the rate of profit. This discourse then mutates into an historical sketch of the long dynamic of capital: from the Great Depression of the end of the nineteenth century, to the Great Crash of the 1930s, to the Social Crisis in the immediate processes of valorisation of the 1960s–1970s (the Great Inflation). Finally, the “new” capitalism (the Great Moderation) and its recent crisis (the Great Recession) are read – integrating Marx and Minsky – as the conjunction between the real subsumption of labour to finance and the fragmentation of labour.

In this essay, I relate G. H. Mead's emergent theory of mind and reflexivity to neuroscience evidence that “minded” practices can be applied in restructuring the neural structures involved in obsessive-compulsive disorders, stroke patients, and depression. The demonstration that such efforts can become causal factors in changing material brain structures attests to the emergent reality of mind as conceived by Mead, the neuroscientist Roger Sperry, and others. This means that mind, arising from the material brain cannot be completely reduced to the biological properties that make it possible. Schwartz and Begley (2002) and Begley (2007) describe the six-step program in minded practices producing structural brain change in The Mind and the Brain. The authors argue for a voluntaristic framework transcending SR behaviorist approaches to behavior modification, which ignore distinctively human capacities. fMRI evidence of the structural changes in brain systems involved in OCD after patients were trained in “minded” behaviors is described.