About

Stephen A. Marglin holds the Walter S. Barker Chair in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. A member of the Harvard class of 1959, Marglin has been on the faculty of the economics department since 1965 and received tenure in 1967. Over the course of his career, Marglin's research and teaching have developed two broad ideas. One focus has been on the foundational assumptions of economics and how these assumptions render community invisible to economists. This work is reflected in his book, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community (Harvard University Press, 2008), which attempts to counter the aid and comfort these assumptions provide to those who would construct a world modeled on economics, a world ultimately without community. In response to the Great Recession, Marglin turned his attention to elaborating Keynes's key insight in the General Theory, namely that unemployment is part of the DNA of capitalism, rather than the result of surface issues such as wage rigidities and other frictions. His book Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First-Century General Theory (Harvard University Press, 2021) builds on Keynes to formulate a macroeconomic theory attuned to the economy of this century.

Research topics

• Economics
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Mathematics
• Positive economics
• Neoclassical economics
• Engineering
• Keynesian economics
• Philosophy
• Macroeconomics
• Biology

Selected publications

• A Plea for Pluralism

  ˜The œJournal of Philosophical Economics · 2023-10-13

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Mainstream economics is one way of understanding how the economy works, but mainstream economists argue much more: that mainstream economics is the onlyway of understanding the economy. Mainstream economists should embrace pluralism for reasons suggested by John Stuart Mill: as a guard against the tyranny of the majority, a tyranny that fortifies itself against doubt not by reason but by power; even if the majority is right and the doubters wrong, engaging with doubt is a way to strengthen correct arguments; and, most likely, according to Mill, there is partial truth on the side of heterodoxy as well as on the orthodox side. The two elements of the power of mainstream economists are related: the police power over what is and what is not published in the major journals, and the role of publication in these journals in the tenure process. Pluralism is not an issue of concern to academics only. Economists of all stripes may try to construct the economy in the image of their theories, but for some time the mainstream has had the upper hand, just as it does in the academy. The push to deregulate the economy, which began in the United States during the Carter presidency, had its full flowering in the financial crisis of 2008.What will it take to allow heterodoxy into the academy? If history is any guide, innovations in economics take root when they are allied to successful political movements. One case in point is the symbiosis between Keynes’s General Theory and the New Deal and social democracy. Another is the resurgence of pre-Keynesian theory dressed up in the high-tech mathematics of New Classical theory and the coming to power of the apostles of neoliberalism in the 1980s. It’s a good bet that for a new economics to take hold in this century, it will do so in partnership, however tacit, with a new politics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Raising Keynes

  2021 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Mathematics
  PublisherDOI

• Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First-Century General Theory

  2021-06-15 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Keynes's General Theory has been misunderstood as relying on frictions to justify the need for the visible hand of government to complement the invisible hand of the market. Fleshing out the GT with tools not available to Keynes, Marglin exposes the fundamental failure of markets to self-regulate and draws lessons for fiscal and monetary policies

  DOI

• 4 Equilibrium with a Given Money Supply: Critical Perspectives on the Second-Pass Model

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 18 Keynes in the Long Run: A Theory of Wages, Prices, and Employment

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 5 The Price Mechanism: Gospels According to Marshall and Walras

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 17 First Steps into the Long Run: Harrod, Domar, Solow, and Robinson

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Raising Keynes

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Keynesian economics
  • Neoclassical economics

  Keynes’s General Theory has been misunderstood as relying on frictions to justify the need for the visible hand of government to complement the invisible hand of the market. Fleshing out the GT with tools not available to Keynes, Marglin exposes the fundamental failure of markets to self-regulate and draws lessons for fiscal and monetary policies.

  PublisherDOI

• 12 The Theory of Interest, II: Liquidity Preference as a Theory of Spreads

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 19 Inflation and Employment Empirics in the Keynesian Long Run

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Robert Dorfman

  University of California, Los Angeles

  5 shared

• Arthur Maass

  5 shared

• Gordon M. Fair

  4 shared

• Harold A. Thomas

  American Board of Emergency Medicine

  4 shared

• Maynard M. Hufschmidt

  4 shared

• Paul Henderson

  4 shared

• Frédérique Apffel Marglin

  3 shared

• Juliet B. Schor

  Boston College

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Harvard University

  1971

• B.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1966