The work below is divided into projects that I am more or less completed with and those I am more or less continuing with.   The work is, to categorize roughly, about Austrian School capital theory and the Austrian School of Economics in general, international economic development in general and in West Africa, cultural economics and economic history.   There is also at the end some non-academic work which is of a more polemical nature.

Ongoing Projects

Book review for independent study on "Public Art in the Depression" with Elzbieta Matynia at the New School for Social Research.  The book reviewed is Labor's Canvas: American Working-Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s, by Laura Hapke (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).  March 2009. An abbreviated version of this review is published by the Economic History Network, May 2009 (see publications section of this homepage).  The larger research in this area is the political economy of art.

Research paper , "How Flexible was the Works Progress Administration in Responding to Unemployment during the Great Depression?," for an independent study with Teresa Ghiralducci at the New School.  The research is on the employment trends during the Great Depression and how the US government performed as a long-term employer of last resort (the only time this has happened in American history).  May 2009.

Term paper, "The Works Progress Administration (1935-1943): Social Safety Net, Central Planning or Political Pragmatism?," for the New School for Social Research Seminar in Historiography and Historical Method taught by Oz Frankel, Fall 2008.  Paper reviews the historiography of the New Deal, which has shown that the public works built under the WPA in the 1930s helped to change American culture, and the nature of American federalism, into a society accepting of a larger role for the federal government explicitly manifested in "Keynesian economics".  Paper was presented at the History of Economics Society conference in Denver, CO in June 2009.

Research proposal on cultural economics, "An Attempt at Calculating an Intergenerational Measure of Equity for Art Museums in the United States."  August 2008.  The research is to evaluate how the top 20 museums (rated by attendance) in the United States allocate their funds between current exhibits and educational programs, with the idea that education creates equity through creating a greater awarenesss of, and appreciation for, the arts. 

Paper currently under review by the Journal of African Development,  "Aid and Liberty in West Africa during the Cold War and Post-Cold War Periods, 1975 - 2005".  The research uses measures of political and civil rights, freely-elected leadership and fiscal accountability (the lack of unproductive public debt) as proxies for human liberty and shows how aid and liberty correlated during and after the Cold War. This research was originally presented to the Global Studies Association conference in NYC in June 2008.  Revisions to the work were then presented to the Africa Finance and Economics Association at the American Economic Associaton meetings in January 2009 in San Francisco.  

Term paper, "Towards a Research Method into the Federal Art Project, 1935-1943 from the Perspective of Cultural Economics" written for the New School for Social Research seminar taught by Professor Will Milberg on Economic Methodology, Spring 2008. This research explores the art created during the Great Depression, the value of this art and the artist to society, and the collective memory of the Depression as we approach the 75th Anniversary of the Federal Art Project.  April 2008.   

Presentation on the Austrian School of Economics prepared for the New School Seminar on Economic Theory and Modeling taught by Duncan Foley.  Austrian School economics assumes an open-ended, evolutionary, freely-associating society organized around individuals meeting and trading in a decentralized manner as a basis for the distribution of resources and the development of institutions in society.  November 2007. 

Working paper on the philosophy of history called the "Laws of Motion for Political Manipulation of Public Memory".  This  work is relatied to my attendance at the New School for Social Research program in Krakow, Poland during the summer of 2007.  The paper presents a model to illustrate how culture 'thins' when collective memory is manipulated for political ends. September 2007.

Draft paper on the history of economic thought about David Ricardo's experience as a bond trader and how this affected the methodolgy in his Principles classic of 1817.  Ricardo is seen by many as the bridge between Adam Smith and Karl Marx. This research in progress shows that Ricardo may have missed the opportunity to model the entrepreneur into society. The lack of theorizing business risk into economics removed the entrepreneur (the decentralized economic actor who does not seek government monopoly rents) from successor mainstream economics and perhaps modeled a class division which was anachronistic.  November 2006. 

Paper, "A General Theory on the Hierarchy of Political and Economic Orders" about civic community and the nation-state, currently being peer-reviewed for publication and presented to the Athens Institute for Education and Research.  August 2007. 

Completed Projects

Notes on a critique of Arnold Hauser's classic The Social History of Art (1951) and Jonathon Harris' introduction to Vol. IV on art beginning with the Second Empire in France in 1830.  Notes discuss Hauser's historical materialism method of analysis, the breakdown of this analysis in modern capitalism and the "realism" versus "art for art's sake" dialectic used so often in art history.  May 2009.

Term Paper, "The Foundations of an Activist Fiscal Policy in the United States: 'The Great Engineer' and Public Works in the 1920s" written for the  Historical Foundations of Political Economy course at the New School for Social Research taught by Gary Mongiovi.  Paper presents Commerce Secretary (and later President) Hoover's creation of public works planning in the USA, shows the first use of the 'multiplier' concept in fiscal policy, and additionaly is revisionist in that it makes clear that Hoover was not a "Do Nothing" President.  March 2009. 

Essay on the "marginal revolution" in economics showing the similarities and differences between Jevons, Menger and Walras.  Paper uses Veblen's critique of marginalism as point-of-entry. In summary Walras' was of his time in creating a "grand theory of everything" based on mathematics, whereas Jevons and Menger wanted to see a more subtle and less universal approach to the modelling of economic actors in society. Menger too was unique in that he valued the entrepreneur as 'productive'.  March 2009. 

Essay on the German Historical and American Institutionalist schools of economics during the late 1800s and early 1900s and which makes the case that these schools are related in both analytical and pre-analytical (normative) method. March 2009. 

Paper, which is a critique of Woody Holton's "Did Democracy Cause the Recession that Led to the Constitution?", written for presentation at the New School Historiography Seminar.  The paper summarizes the historiography around the economic and social relations of those present at the founding of the United States and critiques the view that the United States constitution is "elitist" by bringing in an analysis of the rule of law.  September 2008.

Essay, submitted to Foundation for Economic Education contest on how the work of Adam Smith is still relevant for today's epochal globalization.  July 2008.

Term Paper, written for New School for Social Research Seminar in Transformational Growth taught by Professor Edward Nell. In this paper I compare capital formation in "early" capitalism (1870 to 1914) and "modern" capitalism (1948 to the present) to test the Austrian School theory that cultural and institutional development encourages longer-term investment through the elongation of time-preference and thus can account for the greater growth and wealth in modern capitalism compared to earlier periods.  In the paper I apply an original methodology for quantiying stages of production and explore both the 'reproducible' and 'non-reproducible' economies.  July 2008.

Paper,  "Heuristic on a theory of social science with time and transformation." The paper combines the thought of Sewell, Hayek, Veblen and Marx to define, using simple mathematics as a logical device, a temporal and transformational social science involving human agency and structure.  In addition the paper applies time and transformation to a non-dualist ontolgical social science based on social relations.  June 2008. 

Book review, Arms, War and Terrorism in the Global Economy: Economic Analyses and Civilian Alternatives, Wolfram Elsner, editor (Transaction Publishers, 2007). April 2008.  Currently being reviewed by Defence and Peace Economics. 

Term paper, "The Value Difference in Art Economics" written for and presented to the New School for Social Research seminar in Economic Methodology taught by Professor Will Milberg, Spring 2008.  The paper proposes that the research program in cultural economics is about the difference in value between art and other economic goods in society and presents a survey of cultural economics, especially as it relates to art as a public good.  April 2008.

Essay on "Scarcity versus Reproduction as a Foundation for Economic Value" written for Seminar on Transformational Growth discusses the differences between classical and neo-classical models of economic dynamics in society.  March 2008.

Essay on "The parodoxes of individualism" written for Seminar on Transformational Growth critiques the notion of a dichotomy between the general will and the common good, using the list of "fallacies of composition" in Paul J.  Samuelson's Economics as a basis for analysis.  March 2008.

Paper for New School for Social Research Seminar on Economic Methodology evaluating the methodolgical approach of "Property Rights and Time Preference" by Robert F. Mulligan (Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Spring 2007). February 2008.

Paper, "Critique of Walrasian Equilibrium in the Edgeworth Box" which is about mainstream equilbrium economics and illustrates the 'trading path' model of Professor Duncan Foley in juxtaposition to the 'one price' theorem as commonly seen to be Leon Walras' contribution to economic science through today. September 2007.

Essay on the oftentimes overlooked shared duality of limited resources in both classical and neo-classical economics. October 2007.

Presentation to the New School for Social Research Krakow Program on Isaiah Berlin's concept of nationalism as originally formulated with the addition of modern examples. July 2007.

Presentation of "A General Theory on the Hierarchy of Political and Economic Orders" to the Athens Institute for Education and Research.  August 2007.

Presentation to the  International Consortium of Associations for Pluralism in Economics of  "Questioning Developing Orthdoxy" (see publications link for the paper).  May 2007. 

Paper, "A Critique of International Development based on the Institutional Analysis of Thorstein Veblen," written in honor of the 150th anniversary of Veblen's birth.  Paper applies Veblen's writings on institutions of the early 1900s to the development industry of the early 2000s and shows, again, the prescience of his prognoses. January 2007. 

Paper for macroeconomics class at George Mason University which is a brief summary and critique of Keynes and Keynesian economics.  April 2006.

Some Non-Academic Writings and other Works

Article written for the New York libertarian newspaper Serf City, "The New York Fiscal Crisis and Needed Reform," May 2009. 

Letter to the editor, New York Review of Books, commenting on Benjamin M. Friedman's "The Failure of the Economy & the Economists" in the May 28, 2009 edition, specifically about "animal spirits" and the incentives created by government policy which have created private gain and socialized risk.

This is a Hardfire television show I did with Dr. Steve Finger in May 2009 about the Great Depression in the 1930s in the USA and how it relates (but mostly doesn't) to today's economic conditions.  Here are the graphics which accompanied the show. This show will soon be available from amazon.com in DVD format.

Random observations, "Parables of Economics in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005).  March 2009.

Article written for Serf City, "Is Environmental Quality a Luxury Good?," February 2009. 

Discussion paper  prepared for the Hardfire Brooklyn Cable Access Television show arguing for a "Liquidationist" reponse to deal with the current financial crisis.  The liquiditionists lost the policy debate in the 1930s and some believe that this is what prolonged the Great Depression, October 2008.

Discussion paper  prepared for Hardfire about a proposal to fund government without taxes.  Here is the television show itself in streaming-video. May 2008.

Essay on "State-Money" submitted to Fifth Estate magazine. April 2008.

Notes prepared for Hardfire show about the economic and paternalistic (welfare state) roles for government.  November 2007.

Letter to Editors, New York Review of Books on Robert Solow's review of Duncan K. Foley's Adam's Fallacy. My letter questions Solow's proposition that economics is lacking a moral base for distributional issues, citing the Austrian School of Economics emphasis on property rights (the right to the fruits of one's labor) and freedom to contract as a key to societal organization.  January 2007. 

Essay, "The Unintended Consequences of Drug Prohibition, Rent Control and Minimum Wage on the Urban Underclass" submitted for contest on civil liberties sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies.  December 2006.  

Short paper on consumption, waste and worker alienation in US society.   September 2006. 

Paper about International Development Institutions, the global economy and economic incentives called "The Protestors are Half-Right".  July 2006.

Autobiographical story about culture in Washington DC based around a tennis game. September 2006.