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James Devine

Department of Economics
Loyola Marymount University

One LMU Drive, Suite 4200
Los Angeles, CA 90045
phone: 310/338-2948
FAX: 310/338-1950 (off)

E-mail: jdevine@lmu.edu

Papers available:

Ø political economy. Political theory, Accumulation & Crisis, the Law of Value, and Exploitation.

Ø macroeconomics & economic history. The Great Depression and Stagflation.

Ø other material. Current Events Talks, Old Talks, Other Popular Talks, Growing Inequality, and Notes on Various Topics.

I. Political Economy.

1. Political-Economic Theory.

A. “The Positive Political Economy of Individualism and Collectivism: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau,” Politics and Society (2000).

(i) Cover page for the above – with a summary and comments.

(ii) the technical appendix.

B. “Psychological Autism, Institutional Autism and Economics” published in the Post-Autistic Economics Review, issue no. 16, September 16, 2002 (article 2) at www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/review/issue16.htm. Republished in Edward Fullbrook, ed. The Crisis in Economics: The Post-Autistic Economics Movement: the First 600 Days. pp. 212-20. London: Routledge, 2003.

C. “Utopia” from the Encyclopedia of Political Economy (1999).

2. Accumulation and Crisis.

“The Great Moderation and ‘Falling Off a Cliff’: Neo-Kaldorian Dynamics.” This is a graphical/mathematical model that may explain the recent collapse of the U.S. economy as being the result of the previous “Great Moderation” (the period of relative prosperity between the 1980s and the early 2000s)

1. This paper is published in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 78(3), May 2011: 366-373.

2. The PowerPoint slides from the talk I gave at the August 5 conference of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences at Chapman University in Orange, CA.

3. The notes I used for my presentation at the Allied Social Sciences Associations (URPE session) in January of 2011.

4. A rough draft of the full paper: Diagrams can be seen separately by clicking here.

A. “Marx’s Absolute General Law of Capitalist Accumulation Reconsidered” (as yet unpublished).

B. “Accumulation” from the Encyclopedia of Political Economy (1999).

C. “Cyclical Over-Investment in a Labor-Scarce Economy” from the Eastern Economic Review (1987).

D. “The Tendency toward Over-Investment,” chapter 4 of my 1980 Economics Ph.D. dissertation Over-Investment and Cyclical Economic Crises (University of California, Economics). It’s divided into four parts:

Part 1 of 4 (pp. 82-92); part 2 of 4 (pp. 93-115);

part 3 of 4 (pp. 116-138); and part 4 of 4 (pp. 139-59).

For more chapters from my dissertation, click here.

E. See also Macroeconomics and History and Current Events, below.

3. The “Labor Theory of Value” (or what should be called the “law of value”).

A. “The Utility of Value: the ‘New Solution,’ Unequal Exchange, and Crisis,” Research in Political Economy (1990).

B. “What Is 'Simple Labor": the Value-Creating Capacity of Skilled Labor,” Capital & Class (1989).

C. “The Law of Value and Marxian Political Ecology,” in Jesse Vorst, Ross Dobson, and Ron Fletcher, eds., Green on Red: Evolving Ecological Socialism (Society for Socialist Studies/Fernwood, 1993).

D. The Marxian “Labor Theory of Value” This is somewhat rough.

E. More on this subject (a shorter version of the above).

F. The Wikipedia entry – to which I contributed (especially the “Alternative Interpretation”). Note that this entry could change at any time, changing any content I added.

4. The Theory of Exploitation.

A. Roemer’s “General” Theory of Exploitation is a Special Case. This paper – written with Gary Dymski, now at the University of California-Riverside, argues against the well-known Walrasian-Marxist theory of exploitation presented by John Roemer. Our article was published in Economics and Philosophy, vol. 7 (1991), pp. 235-75.

B. “Taxation without Representation: Reconstructing Marx’s Theory of Capitalist Exploitation,” in William Dugger, ed., Inequality: Radical Institutionalist Views on Race, Gender, Class, and Nation (Greenwood, 1996).

C. Here’s a paper which outlines a longer paper on the Marxian theory of exploitation, stated in terms of neoclassical economics. This is a revised version of the hand-out I used in my talk to URPE at the ASSA convention on January 4, 2004.

D. Here’s the longer draft paper on that subject. This is a preliminary version (dated August 21, 2006) and will change due to your comments and criticisms.

(i) the main paper (draft).

(ii) the abstract.

E. Here’s a more accessible article on the Marxian theory of exploitation. It’s an early version of a paper I published in Bill Dugger’s book, Inequality: Radical Institutionalist Views on Race, Gender, Class, and Nation (1996). For the published article, see here.

II. Macroeconomics and Economic History.

5. The Great Depression.

A. “The Causes of the 1929-33 Great Collapse: A Marxian Interpretation,” Research in Political Economy. (1994).

(i) For charts and tables in separate files, click here.

(ii) For an HTML version with annotation, click here.

B. “The Great Depression” from the Encyclopedia of Political Economy (1999).

C. Another Depressing Article (1/99) – published only in 2002 as “The Causes of the Great Depression of the 1930s and Lessons for Today.” Revista da FEA-PUC [Faculdade de Economia, Administração, Contrabilidade e Atuária da Pontifica Universidade Católica de São Paulo (Brazil)], 2000: 43–50.

D. An old article on the Great Depression: “Underconsumption, Over-Investment and the Origins of the Great Depression.” Review of Radical Political Economics. 15(2) Summer 1983, pp. 1-27.

6. Inflation and Unemployment.

A. “The Rise and Fall of Stagflation: Preliminary Results,” Review of Radical Political Economics (2000).

B. “The Natural Rate of Unemployment,” from Edward Fullbrook, ed., A Guide to What’s Wrong with Economics, Anthem Press (2004).

C. “The Cost of Living and Hidden Inflation,” Challenge (2001).

D. The paper that was the basis for the talk I presented at the URPE@ASSA convention in New Orleans on January 7, 2001 on the encouragement of stagflation by falling profit rates. Here's the hand-out that I gave out and one graph that summarizes my thesis very well. The presentation is a development of the paper that I had published during 2000 (“Rising Profits and Falling Inflation: An Empirical Study,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 32(3), 2000: 398-407).

E. Here's a related unpublished paper that examines the connection between the alleged recent speed-up of productivity growth and the seeming fall in the NAIRU (the rate of unemployment below which inflation is theorized to get worse).

III. Miscellaneous Articles.

7. Current Events Talks. These talks were popular in focus, mostly suggesting predictions about future macroeconomic events but do pretty well in hindsight:

A. Here are some rough notes of a talk on Wall Street parasitism that I gave to a rally held by Occupy Long Beach, Occupy Pasadena, and Occupy Los Angeles in Pershing Square in Los Angeles, CA, on November 12, 2011.

B. Here are notes from a talk on the “Origins of the Big Mess” that I gave at the Westchester Public Library (in Los Angeles) on April 23, 2009. I posit that the U.S. and much of the world have been living under “Calvin Coolidge Capitalism” (neoliberalism), which has produced a bubble economy. I examine both the supply of and the demand for bubbles, and how the Federal Reserve has balanced these two sides of this “market.” Here and here are two graphs I used as part of the talk.

C. Here are notes I presented at the Public Library in Mar Vista (Los Angeles) on March 14, 2009. In interests of full disclosure, this is very similar to the next talk on the list, since I’m a strong believer in recycling. Here is the hand-out I used.

D. Here are notes from a talk I delivered on February 3, 2009 to an upper-division economics class at the University of Redlands (that of Dr. Dorene Isenberg). It compares and contrasts two eras of “Calvin Coolidge Capitalism,” the original one (which helped produce the Great Depression of the 1930s) and the new one (which might have similar effects). Here is a hand-out I presented as part of the talk. This talk was a sequel to the next one on the list:

E. Here are notes from a talk I gave on October 9, 2008 to an upper-division economics class at the University of Redlands. It is a more theoretical version of the talk listed above, emphasizing the basis for and the nature of the business cycle – or lack thereof – during the 1920s and 1930s in the U.S.

F. Here are the notes from a talk on the “Origins of the Current Mess” I gave to the Canejo Valley Unitarian-Universalist fellowship in Thousand Oaks in Ventura County, California on August 15, 2008. The outline is here, while I gave the participants several diagrams: a simple story of the political economy of the 1960s; a picture of the cycle of speculation that’s recently characterized the U.S. economy; and a chart representing “stages” (how the political economy have differed during recent decades in the U.S.)

G. Here’s a talk that I gave on April 8, 2005, to the Society for Humanistic Judaism in Los Angeles. It sketches the recent business cycle in the U.S. and suggest two possible scenarios. I gave a similar talk to to friends of the Filipino Workers’ Association group on February 9, 2008. I was please that a lot of what I said in 2005 turned out to be accurate in 2009.

H. Here’s a talk I gave on March 16, 2004 to the Progress Alliance at Santa Monica College, in California. It’s strangely similar to the talk to the Rotarians below, but with more long-term perspective, including an emphasis on the rate of profit.

I. Here’s a talk I gave on December 9, 2003 to the Downey (California) Rotarians.

J. Here’s a talk I gave in May 2002, to the Student International Forum, at Ohio State University, in Columbus, Ohio. (It was revised in October, 2002.)

K. The talk above was partly based on the talk I gave to the Concerned Citizens at “Leisure World” (El Toro, CA) in May 2002 and partly on the December 2001 talk to a bunch of Marxists in Sacramento, CA (at the appropriately-named “Marxist School of Sacramento”). (The Ohio and Sacramento talks relate current events to the fluctuations of the rate of profit.)

L. The Concerned Citizens talk is an update of a February 2002 talk I gave to the Economics Society at Loyola Marymount University.

M. Here’s a newsy talk that I gave in July 2001 on the state of the economy, to a bunch of businesspeople. It turned out that this was at about the time that many say the 2001 recession started, though recent data indicate that it started earlier. That fit with what the businesspeople said, since they were receiving the brunt of the economy’s collapse.

8. Older articles on then-current events:

A. A Talk about Current Events (3/99)

B. The Goldilocks Economy and the 3 Bears (2/00)

C. The Three Bears Redux! (3/00)

9. Other current events non-macro topics.

A. Here are notes for a talk that I gave on Socialism to the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Santa Monica, CA, on September 17, 2009.

B. Here are the notes for a talk that I gave on the topic of “Capitalism and Militarism” on April 27, 2003 at Woodbury University.

C. Here’s a talk I gave to Dr. Robert Singleton’s economic history class at Loyola Marymount University on the rise and fall of the 1960s prosperity on February 17, 2004. I assumed that the students had read the relevant chapters of Sam Rosenberg’s excellent American Economic Development Since 1945: Growth, Decline and Rejuvenation (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003).

D. Here’s a talk on labor unions that I gave in Dr. Robert Singleton’s Labor Economics course at Loyola Marymount University on April 11, 2005.