Anwar Shaikh (economist)

In 2016, Shaikh published Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crisis.

Shaikh's 2016 book Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crisis is a graduate-level textbook that attempts to revitalize classical political economy, by deriving theoretical and empirical results from classical assumptions. It synthesizes much of his earlier work into a comprehensive theory of micro- and macroeconomics, while critiquing both mainstream neoclassical economics and post-Keynesian alternatives.

A third strand of his work is the relation between theoretical categories and empirical measures. His 1994 book Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts, co-authored with Ahmet Tonak, developed a mapping between the national accounts corresponding to neoclassical and Keynesian concepts and those corresponding to classical and Marxian ones. It is now a classic reference on the subject.

The Simon-Shaikh critique of production functions was taken up by Jesus Felipe, J. S. L. McCombie and others in a series of articles over the years. Further articles by Shaikh in this vein appeared in 1980, 1986, and 2005, the last being in a special journal issue devoted to the subject that included contributions by Felipe, McCombie, and Franklin M. Fisher. Expressing the importance of Shaikh's result, J. E. King remarked that "[i]f there was any justice in the world of economics," Shaikh should have gotten the Nobel Memorial Prize for the humbug production function.

The final strand of his work is a critique of the neoclassical aggregate production function and its associated marginal-productivity theory of income distribution, dating back to his earliest work Laws of Production and Laws of Algebra: The Humbug Production Function (1974). This was a stinging critique of Robert Solow's famous article on the measurement of technical change, following up on a similar criticism of cross-section production functions by Simon and Levy (1963).

He is Professor of Economics in the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science at The New School for Social Research in New York City, where he has taught since 1972.

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.

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.

Anwar M. Shaikh (born 1945) is a Pakistani American heterodox economist in the tradition of classical political economy and Marxian economics.

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.