Anwar Shaikh (economist)

Anwar M. Shaikh (born 1945) is an Indian American economist working in the classical tradition. He is currently Professor of Economics at the Graduate Faculty of The New School in New York City. His work in political economy has focused on the economic theory and empirical patterns of developed capitalism. He has written on international trade, finance theory, political economy, U.S. macroeconomic policy, the welfare state, growth theory, inflation theory, crisis theory, inequality on the world scale, and past and current global economic crises.

Shaikh was born in Karachi, in 1945. He traveled extensively at an early age and attended schools and lived for various lengths of time in Ankara, Washington, D.C., New York City, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur, and Kuwait.

He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1961, received a B.S.E from Princeton University in 1965, worked for two years in Kuwait, and then returned to the United States to study at Columbia University, from which he received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1973. In 1972 he joined the Economics Department at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.

He taught mathematics, physics and social sciences at the Kuwait-American School in Kuwait City in 1966–67 and worked as a teacher of social science and mathematics at Harlem Prep in Harlem, NY, while in graduate school.

His major political influences stem from the civil rights and feminist movements in the US and from progressive development movements abroad. He always found neoclassical economics unpersuasive, and the quest for more solid foundations led him to the works of Roy Harrod, Wassily Leontief, Michał Kalecki, Joan Robinson, Piero Sraffa and Luigi Pasinetti, and subsequently to Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx. The quest for a modern political economy of developed capitalism became a central theme of his subsequent work.

• Capitalism. Competition, Conflict, Crises (2016), Anwar Shaikh, Oxford University Press
• "Globalization and the Myth of Free Trade" (2007), in Globalization and the Myths of Free Trade: History, theory, and empirical evidence, Anwar Shaikh (ed.) Routledge, New York, NY.
• "Nonlinear Dynamics and Pseudo-Production Functions" (2005) in The Eastern Economics Journal, Special Issue on Production Functions.
• "Explaining the Global Economic Crisis: A Critique of Brenner" (1999), Historical Materialism, No. 5.
• "Explaining Inflation and Unemployment: An Alternate to Neoliberal Economic Theory" (1999), in Contemporary Economic Theory, Andriana Vachlou (ed.), Macmillan, London.
• "The Stock Market and the Corporate Sector: A Profit-Based Approach" (1998), in Markets, Unemployment and Economic Policy: Essays in Honour of Geoff Harcourt', Volume Two, Malcolm Sawyer, Philip Arestis, and Gabriel Palma (eds.), Routledge, London.
• "The Empirical Strength of the Labor Theory of Value" (1998), in Conference Proceedings of Marxian Economics: A Centenary Appraisal, Riccardo Bellofiore (ed.), Macmillan, London.
• "The Falling Rate of Profit as the Cause of Long Waves: Theory and Empirical Evidence" (1992), in New Findings in Long Wave Research, Alfred Kleinknecht, Ernest Mandel, and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds.), Macmillan Press, London.
• "Wandering Around the Warranted Path: Dynamic Nonlinear Solutions to the Harrodian Knife-Edge" (1992), in Kaldor and Mainstream Economics: Confrontation or Convergence? (Festschrift for Nicolas Kaldor), Edward J. Nell and Willi Semmler, The Macmillan Press Ltd.
• "The Falling Rate of Profit and the Economic Crisis in the U.S." (1987), in The Imperiled Economy, Book I, Union for Radical Political Economy, Robert Cherry, et al. (eds.)
• "The Transformation from Marx to Sraffa" (1984), in Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa, The Langston Memorial Volume, Ernest Mandel, and Alan Freeman (eds.)
• "On the Laws of International Exchange" (1980), in Growth, Profits and Property, Edward J. Nell (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• "An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theories" (1978), in U.S. Capitalism in Crisis, U.R.P.E., New York.
• "Laws of Production and Laws of Algebra: The Humbug Production Function" (1974), The Review of Economics and Statistics, Volume 56(1), February 1974, p. 115-120.