Alan Freeman

• Master of Science
• Research Affiliate at University of Manitoba

This article shows that economic inequality between nations has systematically worsened in monetary terms since 1950, and that the principal explanator is inequality between blocs of nations, notably the persistent gap between the Global North and Global South. By 2022, the GDP per capita of the North was 12 times greater than that of the South, th...

An article by economist Alan Freeman states the case for an independent BRICS Intellectual Property policy.

This paper introduces the special edition on International Inequality. It contextualizes the papers against the background of the “new inequality literature”. This contains two broad strands: critics of the International Financial Institutions who focus on inequality between nations and those like Piketty who focus on with inequality within nations...

Recent decades have seen a proliferation of literature on creativity, with no consensus about what it consists of. Chinese and Russian contributions throw new light on these debates because of their concern with economic and human development. By integrating this with the widely-used concept of the “creative industries,” a rigorous concept of creat...

This article is the first part of “A General Theory of Value and Money” and sets out the foundations of an axiomatic theory of value and money. Its purpose is to equip the public to explain the four facts that define the modern capitalist economy: the long-term post-war decline of the economies of the global North, the financial instability which p...

This post, on academia.edu, lists a set of three slideshows on the world economy, grouped together for convenience of access. These presentations complement two GERG working papers on the world economy

The original paper is located at https://www.academia.edu/39074969/Divergence_Bigger_Time_The_unexplained_persistence_growth_and_scale_of_postwar_international_inequality Most discussion on inequality focusses on inequality within nations. This report deals with inequality between nations, which is really the driver of inequality within nations....

This report, using data from a range of authoritative sources, studies the long-term postwar economic growth of the industrialised North and shows that this has fallen continuously, with only brief and limited interruptions, since at least the early 1960s. The trend is extremely strong and includes all major Northern economies without exception. It...

The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx provides an entry point for those new to Marxism. At the same time, its chapters, written by leading Marxist scholars, advance Marxist theory and research. Its coverage is more comprehensive than previous volumes on Marx in terms of both foundational concepts and empirical research on contemporary social problems. I...

The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx provides an entry point for those new to Marxism. At the same time, its chapters, written by leading Marxist scholars, advance Marxist theory and research. Its coverage is more comprehensive than previous volumes on Marx in terms of both foundational concepts and empirical research on contemporary social problems. I...

In this introduction, we provide an overall framing of the articles that follow by placing the Ukraine conflict which today embroils the West in confrontation with Russia, within an historical account of the geopolitical economy of contemporary capitalism and the dynamics of imperialism in the twenty-first century, taking particular account of the...

George DeMartino's The Economist's Oath is provoking timely and welcome discussions in economics. This essay assesses the close connection between the ethical dimension of economics and the concept of pluralism, which has become a focus of dissent within economics, especially in the UK and Europe. Both concerns, it argues, arise from the current “t...

This collection focuses on a long-running debate over the logical validity of Karl Marx’s theory that exploitation is the exclusive source of capitalists’ profits. The “Fundamental Marxian Theorem” was long thought to have shown that orthodox Marxian economics succeeds in replicating Marx’s conclusion. The debate begins with Andrew Kliman’s disproo...

This collection focuses on a long-running debate over the logical validity of Karl Marx’s theory that exploitation is the exclusive source of capitalists’ profits. The “Fundamental Marxian Theorem” was long thought to have shown that orthodox Marxian economics succeeds in replicating Marx’s conclusion. The debate begins with Andrew Kliman’s disproo...

This collection focuses on a long-running debate over the logical validity of Karl Marx’s theory that exploitation is the exclusive source of capitalists’ profits. The “Fundamental Marxian Theorem” was long thought to have shown that orthodox Marxian economics succeeds in replicating Marx’s conclusion. The debate begins with Andrew Kliman’s disproo...

This collection focuses on a long-running debate over the logical validity of Karl Marx’s theory that exploitation is the exclusive source of capitalists’ profits. The “Fundamental Marxian Theorem” was long thought to have shown that orthodox Marxian economics succeeds in replicating Marx’s conclusion. The debate begins with Andrew Kliman’s disproo...

This collection focuses on a long-running debate over the logical validity of Karl Marx’s theory that exploitation is the exclusive source of capitalists’ profits. The “Fundamental Marxian Theorem” was long thought to have shown that orthodox Marxian economics succeeds in replicating Marx’s conclusion. The debate begins with Andrew Kliman’s disproo...

This article argues that Samuelson's influential 1987 call for a 'Whig history of economic science' rests on a Whig historiography of the natural sciences. This contrasts with how science actually works: Samuelson neglects the critical role of controversy in the development of knowledge, leading to the misleading idea that scientists pursue discove...

For more than a century, the economics profession has extended its reach to encompass policy formation and institutional design while largely ignoring the ethical challenges that attend the profession’s influence over the lives of others. Economists have proved to be disinterested in ethics, which, embracing emotivism, they often treat as a matter...

Michael Heinrich’s recent Monthly Review article claims that the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit (LTFRP) was not proved by Marx and cannot be proved. Heinrich also argues that Marx had doubts about the law and that, for this and other reasons, his theory of capitalist economic crisis was only provisional and more or less in continu...

This paper offers a suggested framework for formulating economic policy for the cultural and creative industries. It argues that both the cultural and (recently-defined) creative industries are not a recent phenomenon but historically central to the development of the modern industrial economy.It shows that, in terms of conventional economic theory...

Gary Mongiovi accurately cites my thesis, presented in Freeman (2010a) (henceforth referred to as Positivist Marxism and abbreviated to PM), that “capitalism's inner laws express themselves in … different ways during booms and during crises” and that “When the business cycle is in an upswing … the tensions and contradictions that will eventually in...

This article throws light on the current disarray among Marxist analyses of the present crisis. Focusing on recent discussions of "financialization," in particular a recent paper by Costas Lapavitsas, this article highlights a number of difficulties in these discussions and traces them to the absence of any theory of value. Marx's distinction betwe...

A bstract This article presents the case for “assertive pluralism” in economics education and proposes how to achieve it, illustrating the point with reference to the U.K. Subject Benchmark Statement in Economics (SBSE). It proposes a revision of the benchmark, prioritizing the role of controversy in the teaching of economics, combined with plurali...

This chapter restores the concepts of freedom, consciousness, and choice to our understanding of “economic laws,” so we may discuss how to respond to economic crisis. These are absent from orthodox economics that presents “globalization” or “the markets” as the outcome of unstoppable forces outside human control. They were integral to the emancipat...

This article surveys the key ideas and currents of thinking about Marx's value theory since he died. It does so by studying their evolution, in their historical context, through the lens of the Temporal Single System Interpretation (TSSI) of Marx's ideas, an approach to Marx's theory of value which has secured significant attention in recent years....

The most severe economic crisis since 1929 has produced a level of intellectual disarray probably not seen since 1968. In one crucial respect, the climate is different: Marxism's intellectual impact is negligible. The culprit is not Marx but 'Marxism without Marx'—a systematic attempt to divorce his conclusions from his economic theory. The demise...

This paper, on behalf of the UK-based Association for Heterodox Economists (AHE), argues for a reformulation of the Subject Benchmark Statement for Economics (SBSE) on pluralist principles. Pluralism - the capacity to examine critically a range of explanations for observed reality - should be the primary required outcome of economics education. Spe...

This paper offers a critique of the picture of world growth and world inequality generally disseminated by international agencies. The positive view commonly presented depends on the widespread consensus that economic performance should be measured using ‘Purchasing Power Parity’ (PPP) statistics, instead of market exchange rates. Although original...

This reply to Simon Mohun and Roberto Veneziani (2009) points out that they have not addressed, much less overturned, our refutations of Veneziani's celebrated criticisms of Marx and the temporal single-system interpretation (TSSI) of Marx's value theory. Instead, they have filled their "response" with non-responsive irrelevancies. We argue that th...

** 2) A 2004 paper by Roberto Veneziani criticized the temporal single-system interpretation (TSSI) of Karl Marx's value theory as well as Marx's own value theory and law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. This paper responds to Veneziani's critique, showing that it is teeming with falsehoods and logical problems. When assessed in terms...

This article assesses the significance of the January 2009 US unemployment figures. The steep fall of 4 million jobs is greater than any 12-month fall in history. Does this mean that 2007-2008 heralds the worst recession since 1929? This article assesses the empirical evidence of the US payroll figures to date.

We firstly provide a brief description of the crisis episodes, from the 2007-8 "liquidity crisis" to the 2008-9 "global recession". Then, we discuss some possible interpretations of the recent evolution, focussing on diverse aspects of the crisis: from the "elements of novelty" (financial innovations and new practices of risk management) to "known...

This paper, on behalf of the UK-based Association for Heterodox Economists (AHE), argues for a reformulation of the Subject Benchmark Statement for Economics (SBSE) on pluralist principles. Pluralism – the capacity to examine critically a range of explanations for observed reality – should be the primary required outcome of economics education....

Purpose This paper aims to make a submission to the UK's Economic and Social Research Council as part of its international benchmarking review of economics. Design/methodology/approach The approach takes the form of a discussion of the health of economics in the UK from the perspective of heterodox or pluralist economists who are members of the As...

This report is a pre-final version of a report published by the Greater London Authority and the London Development Agency in March 2008. It benchmarks London’s cultural offer against four other world cities: Paris, New York, Tokyo and Shanghai and is the first comprehensive such undertaking compiled according to international standards. The final...

Prepublication version of ‘Simultaneous Valuation vs. the Exploitation Theory of Profit: A summing up’, forthcoming in Capital and Class #94, Spring 2008 This paper examines the claims made by Simon Mohun and Roberto Veneziani in their Capital and Class #92 article entitled ‘The incoherence of the TSSI: a reply to Kliman and Freeman’. We show that...

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 whic...

This paper describes the Greater London Authority’s evidence base for its work on the creative and cultural industries. Its main purpose is to show that th9is evidence base is viable, robust, and useful. The second and most important purpose is to encourage others in city management to invest in such evidence bases, and to compile them on a compara...

This paper revisits one of the classic debates on world capitalist development – the ‘transition to capitalism’ debate framed in Robert Brenner’s classic critique of World Systems and Dependency Theory. It was originally presented to the July 2007 conference of the International Confederation for Pluralism in Economics (ICAPE) and in a slightly mod...

This paper was originally presented at the ‘Marxism and Political Economy’ conference called by the International Socialist Journal on Saturday 29th September 2007. A revised version was presented to the Historical Materialism conference on 13th November 2007. It enquires why, although national economic equality is one of the most persistent featur...

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 Aut...

This paper undertakes a critical examination of the concept of 'centre of gravity' as adapted by economics from classical mechanics, relating it to the idea of 'long-run' profits, prices and quantities, as presented in the work of the post-Sraffians.(1) It will also address the origin of this concept of 'long-run' in Marshall's distinction between...

This is a prepublication version of ‘Replicating Marx: a reply to Mohun’, Capital and Class No. 88, Spring 2006, pp 117-123. ISSN 0309 8168 Kliman (2001) showed that “simultaneist” interpretations – those which hold that Marx valued inputs and outputs simultaneously – contradict his exploitation theory of profit, while the temporal single-system in...

This article was published in Freeman, Alan (2006): Die Himmel über uns. Über die Bedeutung des Gleichgewichts für die Wirtschaftswissenschaft, EXIT! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft 3, 212-241 It is the German translation of an chapter originally published in Mosini, V (ed) (2007) Equilibrium in Economics: Scope and Limits. London: Routledge...

This paper on inclusion was presented to the at the 2005 summer school of DEEEP (Development Education Exchange in Europe Project), Härnösand - Sweden, 5 - 12 June 2005. It addresses the significance of the concept of world civilisation. It assesses how meaning may be attached to the concept of inclusion in an economically polarised world. It devel...

This article describes the calculation of London’s first Living Wage, which was set in 2005. It reproduces, in citable form and, for scholarly purposes, the report of the same name produced by the authors for the Greater London Authority.

This is a prepublication version of an analysis of the world economy which appeared in ‘The Inequality of Nations’ in Freeman, A, and Boris Kagarlitsky (eds) (2004) The Politics of Empire: Globalisation in crisis. London: Pluto Press. ISBN: 0 74532 183 6. It develops and presents rigorously much of the analysis of ‘The New world order and the failu...

This article presents a detailed textual analysis of Marx’s actual account of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and attempts to recover the initial logic of the analysis It sets this against early discussion on Marx’s value theory and shows, in a non-mathematical manner, how a purely physical conception of the profit rate was substituted f...

This is a prepublication version of the German 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...

This article describes the construction of the workforce employment data used by the Greater London Authority. It reproduces, in citable form and, for scholarly purposes, the report of the same name produced by the author for the Greater London Authority. This article describes the sources of this data and explains where they can be found. Workforc...

Prepublication version of ‘When things go wrong: the Political Economy of Market Breakdown’ in Westra; R and Alan Zuege (Eds) (2003) Value and the World Economy Today: Production; Finance and Globalization; pp91-118. London:MacMillan; ISBN: 1 40390 002 7 This paper constructs a theoretical framework for understanding what happens when markets break...

This is a prepublication version of an analysis of stagnation and divergence in the world economy which appeared in Pettifor, A (2003) Real World Economic Outlook, pp152-159. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp152-164. A fuller version of this same paper was presented to the British International Studies Association conference in September 2002. It...

This paper was first presented at the conference on value of The Laboratory for Social Critique, Rome, May, 21, 2002 and subsequently at the 2002 conference of the Association for Heterodox Economics, July 2002. This is the most complete version, presented to the 2002 conference of the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, September 20...

This paper follows the 9/11 paper presented at METU in the previous year. It attempts to analyse the fundamental features of the world economy giving rise to the present military phase. It argues that globalisation is a self-limiting process. Fundamental long-term developments, arising out of the present organisation of the world economy, are actin...

This interview is a prepublication version of an article that appeared in the Turkish journal Praxis in September 2002. The article published answers to questions posed by the journal editors to Alan Freeman, Riccardo Bellofiore and Hugo Radice. In this article I have assembled my own responses, taken from the original transcript, to provide an art...

This paper was presented at 15:00 hours local time in Ankara, Turkey on 11th September 2001. On the basis of an economic analysis of the world economy it surmises an entry into an ‘age of war’ – a period of financial and military competition between advanced countries comparable to the period of classical imperialism from 1893-1918. At the close of...

We study the effect of different acquirer types defined by financial status and their payment methods on their short and long-term performance in terms of abnormal returns using a variety of benchmark models. For a sample of 543 UK acquirers during 1983-95, we examine the relative performance of acquirers based on their pre-bid financial status as...

The idea of this chapter is to ask what is happening to the world market. This is an innocent enough question and, as orthodox economics often approaches it, the only difficulties seem to be technical and empirical: get the data, make the model, feed the computer and churn out the result. I will argue that the real difficulty is not the answer but...

This article is a prepublication transcript of ‘Has the Empire Struck Back?’ in Albritton, R, Makoto Itoh, Richard Westra and Alan Zuege (eds) Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises, and Globalization, pp195-215. London: McMillan. ISBN 0 33375 316 X The paper conducts an empirical examination of the current state of the world market with a...

Article that appeared as Zarembka, P (ed) Economic Theory of Capitalism and its Crises, Research in Political Economy 18, pp241-48. Stanford, CT: JAI Press. (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.cws_home/621298/description#description) Responds to debate initiated in Research in Political Economy 17 (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/boo...

Article that appeared as Zarembka, P (ed) Economic Theory of Capitalism and its Crises, Research in Political Economy 18, pp285-93. Stanford, CT: JAI Press. (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.cws_home/621298/description#description) Responds to debate initiated in Research in Political Economy 17 (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/boo...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the discussion among marxists about the rate of profit. This is done by the method of symptomatic reading, hence in a different way from what has become standard. Beginning from the fact that Marx and his critics draw diametrically opposite conclusions from the same premises – continuously rising productivity...

This entry, submitted to Philip O’Hara’s Encyclopedia of Political Economy but not included in it, contrasts the temporal and simultaneist approaches to the formation of price and its relation to value.

This article appeared as ‘Crisis and the Poverty of Nations: Two Market Products Which Value Explains Better’, Symposium on Robert Brenner and the World Crisis, Historical Materialism No.5, Winter 1999, pp 29-77. London: LSE. ISSN 0 9532171 4 0 The original can be referenced at http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/hm/1999/00000005/00000001;j...

Prepublication version of article that appeared as Zarembka, P (ed) Economic Theory of Capitalism and its Crises, Research in Political Economy 17, pp241-48. Stanford, CT: JAI Press. http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.cws_home/621298/description#description This article formed part of a four-way exchange on the rate of profit which ap...

This paper discusses the relation between law and contingency in the formation of value. It begins from a much-ignored assertion of Marx, repeated throughout his works, that the equality of supply and demand is contingent and their non-equality constitutes their law. This highly complex and original idea leads us to the idea of capitalism, and a ma...

The paper examines the the profession of economics in the light of its disarray in the face of the financial crash of 1998 We subject the profession to a theoretical and historical enquiry, examining both its reaction to the empirical facts of its failures, and the manner in which its theoretical categories express the material interests to which...

Prepublication version of ‘Measuring the UK Economy’, in Dorling, D. and Simpson, S. (1999) Statistics and Society, p361-369. London Arnold. ISBN 0 340 71994 X. This article demonstrates that the System of National Accounts (SNA) implicitly specify a conception of value. They divide all productive activities into those which create value (paid labo...

This paper establishes, and illustrates for the case of the UK, a temporal method for calculating the labour values of outputs from any process or sector of a market economy. It exhibits the temporal calculation of the Monetary Equivalent of Labour Time (MELT), the general ratio between monetary and labour time magnitudes, for a single national eco...

This is the first published general refutation of the Okishio theorem. An earlier refutation based on a specific example was published by Kliman and McGlone in 1988. Okishio’s theorem, published in 1961, asserts that if real wages stay constant, the rate of profit necessarily rises in consequence of any cost-reducing technical change. It proves thi...

This paper is the first published critique of the indeterminacy of price-value correlations and their inadequacy as empirical evidence for the determination of prices by values. It comments on the approach developed by Shaikh, Petrovic, Parys, Ochoa and others, according to which prices, as asserted by Ricardo, are empirically ‘97%’ determined by v...

This paper, published in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe , Number 59, 1998. pp 74-93 and reproduced in a number of journals and books, examines the consequences for world trade of the restructuring – commonly termed ‘globalisation’ that arose out of the Uruguay round of the GATT and let to the reconstruction of the World Trade Organisation in its pr...

This paper, presented at the 1998 conference of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy in Lisbon, shows how variations in the value of money, and in the exchange rate between different moneys of account, lead to transfers of value on the one hand between national or continental monetary blocs and on the other, between the finan...

This paper was presented to the Brasilian Society for Political Economy at its 1998 conference. It presents the principal differences between the temporal and the simultaneist approach to the theory of value. It was the first paper to present a formal conceptual analogy between the temporal approach in economics, and the Galilean approach in astron...