Steven Pressman

Monmouth University · Department of Economics, Finance, and Real Estate

Drawing on archival data and oral histories, this paper examines the history of the Eastern Economic Association from its beginnings in 1974 to its 50th anniversary in 2024. It sheds light on the ideological, social, and political motivations behind the EEA’s founding, focusing on its commitment to addressing the narrowness of the economics profess...

Households with children face burdens that households without children don’t face. Besides food, clothing, shelter and healthcare, childcare can easily run several thousand dollars each year. Historically, US economic and social policies have done little to help families with children. Until 2018, families with children were helped indirectly throu...

Much ink has been spilled on poverty measurements and trends, at the expense of revealing causality. Assembling multidisciplinary and international contributions, this book shows that a causal understanding of poverty in rich and poor countries is essential. That understanding must be based on a critical interrogation of the wider social relations...

Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster Capital in the Twenty-First Century was followed by the publication of Capital and Ideology in early 2020. This paper looks at the differences between the two books, and provides an analysis and a critique of the main advances in the new book. First, Piketty drops r>g as an explanation for rising inequality. Instead, in...

This article provides a summary, analysis, and critique of John Smithin’s recently published book Rethinking the Theory of Money, Credit, and Macroeconomics. The book can be viewed as Smithin’s magnum opus. It focuses on how profits arise under capitalism and provides a sensible explanation in terms of money and the need to borrow. As with John’s o...

Central banks have recently pushed interest rates below zero. This was done after some considerable time with interest rates being near zero and unemployment remaining very high in many countries. The hope was that negative rates would reinvigorate monetary policy and rescue countries suffering from high unemployment and slow growth. This paper arg...

Link to article: http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue83/PressmanScott83.pdf

The condition of the middle class constitutes a significant and critical “juncture” for any welfare strategy aimed at combatting social and economic processes that are increasing the vulnerability of many households and further degrading social life. European countries are still ‘middle-class nations’, moreover, the middle class is no longer a locu...

This paper is a response to Deirdre McCloskey's review essay, published recently in this journal, of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the twenty-first century. It argues that McCloskey has set up a number of straw men to attack. Furthermore, her three main arguments against Piketty are flawed. McCloskey wants human capital to be added to Piketty's measu...

Experienced economics editors discuss navigating the world of scholarly journals, with details on submission, reviews, acceptance, rejection, and editorial policy. Editors of academic journals are often the top scholars in their fields. They are charged with managing the flow of hundreds of manuscripts each year—from submission to review to rejecti...

Child poverty in the United States has averaged around 20% since the late 1970s. During this time period, it has been consistently and considerably higher than poverty rates for other age groups. The case is often made that poverty in the United States is greatly underestimated. The many problems involved in measuring aggregate poverty rate also pl...

This article discusses the main economic contributions of Paul Krugman. Krugman developed the new trade theory, which analyses the determinants of international trade when trade takes place among oligopolistic firms, and the new economic geography, which studies where firms locate nationally and worldwide. His also drew out the policy implications...

This paper discusses the regressive nature of tax exemptions for children compared to child allowances and estimates the decline in child poverty in several developed countries due to child allowances. The paper then estimates the decline in child poverty in the United States due to tax exemptions for children and simulates the impact of various po...

This paper examines how consumer debt impacts middle-class households. Interest payments on this debt reduce spendable income and household living standards. We argue that it is necessary to account for interest payments on consumer debt when measuring income inequality and the size of the middle class, and then estimate the impact of doing this us...

A bstract Post Keynesian economics has mainly focused on macroeconomic issues and ignored microeconomic policy issues. This paper begins to remedy this gap. It outlines the main principles of the Post Keynesian approach, distinguishes them from neoclassical economics, explains how these principles can be applied to microeconomic issues, and then dr...

div>En este artículo se utiliza el Estudio de Luxemburgo sobre Ingresos (ELI) para analizar la dimensión de la clase media en varios países latinoamericanos. Uno de los principales hallazgos es que a mediados de la primera década de este siglo, el tamaño de la clase media en América Latina no parecía depender de factores demográficos. Un segundo h...

Over the past several decades, one case for deregulating financial markets has been that this would release the forces of financial innovation for the good of all. Unhindered financial markets were supposed to increase efficiency in financial markets and reduce costs to borrowers, which would benefit the whole economy. Greater access to credit woul...

Our previous research argued that interest payments on consumer debt should be subtracted from household income to measure poverty. We estimated 4 million additional poor Americans in 2007, calling them "debt poor." This paper finds that the debt poor are somewhat like the poor (they are unlikely to own a home or have private health insurance), som...

This paper argues that interest on consumer debt must be taken into account when measuring poverty and inequality. These interest payments cannot be used to support household living standards. This makes middle- and low-income households worse off. Recent increases in consumer debt means that this deterioration in living standards is not captured b...

Purpose – This paper seeks compare the current financial and economic problems with the problems facing the world economy in the 1930s. Design/methodology/approach – The paper argues that the Great Depression and the current problems have similar causes – excessive speculation, leading to a financial collapse that then results in an economic colla...

This paper discusses some of the key contributions of John Kenneth Galbraith to economics and puts them into an historical context. It argues that the work of Galbraith should be recognized as making major contributions to the Post Keynesian paradigm. His work expands on the contributions made by John Maynard Keynes and is consistent with the main...

This paper examines Robert Heilbroner’s 1950 article in Harper’s Magazine on poverty in the USA. It argues that this piece was the first attempt to raise popular concerns about poverty in the USA after World War II, and in many ways sought to do what John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society and Michael Harrington’s The Other America accomplish...

No abstract available

J.K. Galbraith was a highly original theorist whose contributions deserve lasting recognition. Galbraith analyzed the significant economic power held by large firms, which underpinned the success of the U.S. economy in the post-World War II era. Galbraith highlighted how this concentration of power creates a range of unintended problemsâsocial and...

Abstract This paper examines two possible explanations for why investors are so often and so easily taken by the likes of Robert Bennett and his New Era fraud or Nick Leeson's sinking of the esteemed Barings Bank. I rule out the traditional explanations offered by neoclassical economics such as asymmetric information in a world of calculable risk....

The voting paradox has been a problem for both the public choice and rational choice schools. A recent attempt to deal with this paradox argues that voting is like applauding at a concert and is therefore expressive rather than rational behavior. This paper argues that such a move fails because: (1) there are many essential differences between voti...

From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, Keynesian macroeconomics dominated the discipline of economics, and developed economies performed extremely well. On every important measure of economic performance — unemployment, inflation, productivity growth and rising living standards — the 1950s, the 1960s and the early 1970s were a Golden Age...

Galbraith's principal theoretical contribution is foreshadowed in American capitalism and unfolds more clearly into view in his trilogy The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State and Economics and the Public Purpose. His thesis is that the economic ideas that once explained a world of poverty have not adjusted to a world of affluence dominated...

This paper examines the tradeoffs inherent in guaranteed income proposals. Its perspective is international, using the Luxembourg Income Study and asking whether economic efficiency suffers when governments make greater efforts to protect the poor. Using two different measures of productivity growth, we find no big tradeoff between equity and effic...

This article introduces the Review of Social Economy symposium on the basic income guarantee (BIG). It argues that there are several ways in which the BIG is consistent with social economics. First, the BIG is an attempt to meet the minimum material needs of US citizens and contribute to the common good. Second, important arguments for a BIG move b...

This article has no abstract

This paper examines the major economic contributions of Amartya Sen. Sen's contributions fall into three main areas: a philosophical critique of traditional economic assumptions, an attempt to build a more realistic economic science based on the notion of entitlements and human capabilities, and a long series of practical contributions to welfare e...

Unemployment once again plagues the world economy. Since the beginning of the 1990s, unemployment rates in Europe have averaged close to 10 per cent. Things have become so bad that even Sweden, once proudly boasting unemployment rates consistently below 2 per cent, has watched helplessly while 13 per cent of its labour force cannot find work.

Changes are sweeping the world economy and are most apparent in post-socialist Europe and in the developing world. This volume examines the impact these changes are having on women. The authors discuss the evidence of gender bias and reach some telling if unsurprising conclusions. Regardless of the country involved, the findings point to consistent...

Beginning with Adam Smith, historians of economic thought have had high regard for Quesnay and the Physiocrats. The same, however, cannot be said of their economic model — the Tableau Economique. Well known is Eugen Duhring’s opinion that the Tableau is a mathematical fantasy comparable to squaring the circle.1 More recently, Paul Samuelson has equ...

This article describes the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), an international database containing economic and socio-demographic information on more than a dozen developed countries. The article also describes the results of empirical studies that have been undertaken using LIS, the potential research questions that can be addressed with LIS, and the...

Traducción de: Women in the Age of Economic Transformation Obra en que se analizan las repercusiones sobre la vida de las mujeres de las transformaciones económicas ocurridas en países subdesarrollados y de Europa Oriental tras el derrumbe del socialismo como modelo económico. Las conclusiones a que se llega es que, aunque las economías nacionales...

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