Unconventional economic essays

Amit Bhaduri is internationally known for some of the economic writings collected in this volume, even though he has been a well-known critic of mainstream neoclassical theory. Significantly, several essays in the volume indicate an alternative paradigm in terms of which economic analysis can be more fruitfully conducted.

The nineteen essays selected for this volume, and written over nearly a quarter century, span a wide range of topics in macro, micro, and development economics. The early essays on capital and growth theory show why the neoclassical aggregative approach is logically faulty. Bhaduri also shows how it results in an intellectually barren construction which fails to deal with the problem of accumulation in irreversible historical time. This negative criticism is supplemented by showing how the problem of proportionality', a neglected aspect of neoclassical growth theory, assumes critical importance when accumulation is considered in real or historical, as opposed to logical, time. Equilibrium analysis based on profit maximization becomes a misleading construct in theories of growth and

distribution. In contrast, he explores the Bayesian statistical approach to learning as a way of dealing with the complex problem of profit-seeking and 'satisficing' behaviour in an uncertain economic environment.

In a related set of essays, Bhaduri analyses the question of unemployment in advanced capitalist economies. He shows how the centrality of effective demand in Keynes', and in Kalecki's, theory makes modern neoclassical resurrection of classical unemployment in a general equilibrium framework a misleading construct. Political ideologies underlying theories of unemployment are also explained through a novel analytical generalization of the Keynesian framework.

In two essays on planning techniques for project evaluation and foreign trade, Bhaduri again departs from the dominant neoclassical tradition and shows how to make analysis more fruitfully robust in these areas by getting rid of subjectivist utility-based welfare theories. Finally, some of his works on development economics, especially on backward agriculture, demonstrate how to incorporate economic power systematically into analytical models.