Turbulent Dynamics and Hidden Patterns: Economic Analysis in a Global Context


This research project demonstrates that a revived form of the “magnificent dynamics” of the classical economists can explain the actual patterns of developed economies involving relative industrial prices, stock prices and interest rates, exchange rates, and inflation.

Modern representatives of the classical tradition are almost entirely concerned with the properties of some hypothetical long-period equilibrium situation and seldom refer to actual empirical patterns. By contrast, this project shows that the actual major long-term patterns of developed economies can be explained by a small set of operative principles in which the drive for profit plays a central role. There is never any moment in which long period equilibrium exists as such, and a central theme of this project is that order and disorder are equally characteristic of market processes. That is, market order is achieved in and through disorder.

The result of this grant is the book, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises, published by Oxford University Press in February 2016.