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Mitigation policies during the COVID-19 pandemic were justified on benefit-cost-analysis (BCA) grounds, with the value of a statistical life (VSL) measuring the benefit of saving lives. This essay argues that a BCA and VSL framework is not a value-neutral basis for pandemic policy: first because the characterization of labor-market behavior as choices merely regarding money and risk of mortality implicitly endorses those institutions that constrain such choices, as illustrated by pandemic economic conditions; and second because this characterization assumes that individual subjects have exogenous preferences, and accordingly have one "true" valuation, thus ignoring how subjectivity is constituted by capitalist institutions. Such VSL estimates in pandemic scholarship illustrate the search for a single valuation regarding elderly life, whereas the "good" of human life warrants valuation in our capacity as citizens in democratic institutions rather than as market agents. The language of overdetermination highlights the contradictory effects of the mutual constitution of institutions and the individual subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using neoclassical thought as his entry point, Yahya M. Madra offers a vital prolegomenon to a recalibrated critical political economy. Madra's reinterpretation of the economic field pivots around what he calls the theoretical-humanist problematic, suggesting that an ontologically inflected recharacterization of economic thought is essential to any serious development of progressive alternatives to dominant mainstream forms of political economy. After outlining the constituent elements of theoretical humanism and some of Madra's key conceptual moves, this essay explores several analytical, normative, and ideological implications of such a redrawing of the boundaries of economic thought. Madra's intervention opens up at least three lines of inquiry regarding the theoretical-humanist problematic: the relative amplitude of tensions internal to different economic approaches in its orbit, including their capacities to resist or escape its gravitational pull; how it circumscribes the scope of concrete, normative visions; and how everyday practices and identifications reinforce or depart from related ideological fantasies underpinning it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the final essay of the symposium on Linhart, Eren Kozluca interrogates the epistemological value of Linhart's texts of the late 1970s and early 1980s, at the same time offering a protocol for reading his body of work. This issue opens with a special symposium that revisits some of Robert Linhart's key texts and ideas while expanding on analyses of his work. In a rejoinder that returns the favor to these generative encounters, Yahya Madra picks up on a cue reflected in all three commentaries, to a greater or lesser degree: they all read his text "in a certain psychoanalytical key", invoking psychoanalytical insights - in fact, Madra calls them "models" - in order to expand on the book's critique of political economy. [Extracted from the article]

Despite the fact that psychoanalytical concepts are absent in Yahya M. Madra's Late Neoclassical Economics, the three commentaries on the book, by Chakrabarti, Glynos, and Primrose, read the text in a certain psychoanalytical key, and for good reason. Their readings demonstrate that a number of unnamed psychoanalytical models silently informed the discourse analysis mobilized throughout the text. Reading late neoclassical economics as an internally differentiated field of defense formations against contradictions, antagonisms, and conflicts that arise from the constitutive destructuredness of the economy, this response essay by Yahya M. Madra explores the applicability of the key psychoanalytical concepts of negation (repression, foreclosure, disavowal) for a discourse analysis of economic models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review of Yahya Madra's Late Neoclassical Economics centers on a claim made by mainstream economics to have surpassed the narrow horizon of neoclassical economics, understood as general equilibrium or Walrasian economics, having differentiated into a pluralist field. Through a detailed study of neoclassical economics, Madra distills the misplaced nature of this claim and disputes the propositions that neoclassical economics is nothing but Walrasian and that its new diverse theories belong to the nonneoclassical domain. Rather, the diverse theories of mainstream economics are shown to share with Walrasian economics, and with one another, a common problematic of theoretical humanism in the form of reconciling individual and aggregative/collective rationality in order to achieve a socioeconomic order. This review discussion ends by raising some issues that are absent or latently present in Madra's book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary reflects on the potential of Madra's Late Neoclassical Economics for comprehending neoliberalism. Extending Madra's work, it presents an ideology critique of late neoclassical economics (LNE) as articulating a social fantasy of harmonious market order that enables neoliberal proponents to structure their reality against the Real of Capital. Madra's exposition of LNE's orientation around the theoretical problematic of neoclassical humanism enables consideration of neoliberalism as informed by an obsessional neurotic logic, whereby subjects postpone encountering the Real via repeated ideological modifications to preserve their fantasy against traumatic incursions. Exploring the conditions of possibility for functioning markets, LNE reinforces the fantasy of market order through theoretical innovations rationalizing increasingly intensive measures to realize it. Thus, symptoms bleeding through gaps between the Symbolic reality of neolibealism and the Real of Capital are disavowed as market and cognitive failures, foreclosing critical engagement with capitalist dynamics. This is illustrated through examining the new institutional economics of development as disavowing the violence of capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Editors' Introduction written by Edward Baring and Maliha Safri on behalf of the Editorial Collective. Yahya M. Madra Teaches economics and history of economic thought at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, since 2016, and is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City, since 2022. Maliha Safri Teaches political economy at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. [Extracted from the article]

In expressing his appreciation for the work of David Ruccio's blog, Occasional Links & Commentary, Richard Wolff discusses the common experiences of faculty members working from heterodox economics theories in the U.S. university system following the turn to neoclassical economics. After the marginalization and eventual removal of the notable heterodox economics department at the University of Notre Dame, Ruccio turned to blogging as a way of translating academically formulated concepts into and for general discussion with a wider readership that includes activists, social critics, academics, journalists, and a new generation of leftist politicians. This work of "popularization," rather than nonscientific, has constituted an important contribution to long-overdue social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Ruccio's blog, Occasional Links & Commentary, having grown out of postings created for his students at the University of Notre Dame, continues to focus on teaching its audience, putting information and trends into the context of a self-consciously Marxian understanding built from the concepts of class and surplus, understood not as a taxonomy but as process. From revealing the pretensions of neoclassical economics by examining the ongoing economic impacts of events, such as the Second Great Depression, to addressing theoretical controversies and misrepresentations, such as with Modern Monetary Theory, the blog not only examines policy choices and encourages readers to criticize and press for changes but also prods readers to consider more than the usual form of policy choices, beyond governments as actors and citizens as consumers of the consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a productive engagement with some of the themes brought forward by Carole Biewener and David Ruccio in their respective comments on Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian (MIT Press, 2012). This effort elucidates further some scattered discussions on subjectivity implicit throughout the book, arguing that inscribed in the very structure of the book itself are the contours of a nonreductionist, nonessentialist theory of subjectivity that escapes the pitfalls of both choice-based theoretical humanisms and mechanistic structuralisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Noting the insights to be gained from Wolff and Resnick's lucid and insightful comparative explication of neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian economic theories, this paper reflects on new theories of human behavior in late neoclassical theory that open doors to socially contingent understandings of subjectivity. In theirContending Economic Theories, Wolff and Resnick illustrate that different methodologies and entry points matter with respect to understanding crucial social issues such as income distribution, poverty, capitalism, and the class composition of profits. They offer an avenue for appreciating the nature, conditions, and consequences of class processes without insisting on a totalizing ontology, centered subjects, or economism. This approach to Marxian class analytics is compatible with many insights of poststructuralist feminism and, as exemplified by the work of many within AESA, has provided fertile ground for a reinvigorated class politics interested in proliferating differences that enable alternative class, gender, sexual, and racial ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay summarizes the major features and original contributions of Contending Economic Theories, by Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick. It also analyzes the book's history and reveals how the author uses the book in his own approach to teaching economics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Like most capitalist crises, today's challenges economists, journalists, and politicians to explain and to overcome it. The post-1930s struggles between neoclassical and Keynesian economics are rejoined. We show that both proved inadequate to preventing crises and served rather to enable and justify (as “solutions” for crises) what were merely oscillations between two forms of capitalism differentiated according to greater or lesser state economic interventions. Our Marxian economic analysis here proceeds differently. We demonstrate how concrete aspects of U.S. economic history (especially real wage, productivity, and personal indebtedness trends) culminated in this deep and enduring crisis. We offer both a class-based critique of and an alternative to neoclassical and Keynesian analyses, including an alternative solution to capitalist crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]