#031 When The Invisible Hand Shakes

After a brief holiday to bask in the cold and brutal wet weather of Ireland and England, the show is back on the road, fueled up, and raring to go. This weeks guest is Professor Alan Freeman, where we talk about the falling rate of profit, crises of capitalism, and our way out of the current economic mire. The interview is loosely based about a paper of his just published in the Journal of Australian Political Economy called: The Profit Rate in the Presence of Financial Markets: A Necessary Correction.(http://media.wix.com/ugd//b629ee_20b6bcc79e688bee2ab6f94f971f7b06.pdf)You can see him talking about it at the recent Historical Materialism conference in New York:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TODNwYP1zYAAlan is a retired but research-active cultural economist. He formerly worked for the Mayor of London's Economic Analysis Unit where he was responsible for the Living Wage, Innovation, and the Cultural and Creative Industries. He is co-editor, with Radhika Desai, of a new book series entitled 'the Future of World Capitalism', published by Pluto Books. He is one of a 'small club' of economists who predicted the crash of 2008, and in 2008 he also predicted that the economic crisis would not leave the industrialised countries until these countries undertook public investment on the scale associated with US government spending during World War II (about 55% of GDP). He is a visiting Professor at London Metropolitan University where he works on the Cities Cultural and Creative Evidence project, and currently lives in Winnipeg, Canada. Enjoy!