Steven Pressman

Pressman has written on financial frauds and their causes, including articles on specific frauds such as Charles Ponzi, Martin Frankel, and Health South. He has argued that naive optimism, a human character trait, is one reason that financial frauds are so prevalent. Another reason is herd behavior. Yet another reason is the lack of adequate government controls and insufficient checks and balances on firms and on individuals working for firms. Finally, human laziness comes into play – the failure of people to do the simple homework necessary to identify likely fraudulent activity.

Finally, Pressman has argued that Robert Nozick's position on the justice of government redistribution programs, which is put into concrete terms with his famous Wilt Chamberlain example, is badly flawed for four reasons – it ignores actual history, yet purports to be a historical theory of justice, it ignores empirical evidence on justice, it ignores the social nature of production and it ignores the future.

His book, 50 Major Economists, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2006) brings the ideas of key economists from the past to a more general audience.

He has served as co-editor of the Review of Political Economy since 1995, as Associate Editor and Book Review Editor of the Eastern Economic Journal since 1989, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Basic Income Studies since 2005.

He has been on the Board of Directors of the Eastern Economic Association from 1994 to the present, and since 1996 he has served as Treasurer of the group. In addition he has been a regular book reviewer for "Dollars and Sense" since 2010.

Pressman is the elder son of Jeffrey and Phyllis Pressman. Pressman and his brother Alan, a bankruptcy attorney on Long Island, attended public school in Queens (New York) and graduated from Francis Lewis High School. Pressman attended Alfred University in upstate New York, where he received a B.A. in philosophy in 1973. He then attended Syracuse University and received an M.A. in philosophy in 1976. He went on to study economics at the New School, working with Robert Heilbroner, Edward J. Nell, David Gordon, and Vivian Walsh. He received his Ph.D. in 1983 for his work on Francois Quesnay's Tableau Économique, the first economic model.

Steven Pressman (born February 23, 1952 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American economist. He is a former Professor of Economics and Finance at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, NJ. He has taught at the University of New Hampshire and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.