Stephen A. Marglin holds the Walter S Barker Chair in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. His recent work focuses on the foundational assumptions of economics and how these assumptions make community invisible to economists. This work, reflected in his book, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community (Harvard University Press, 2008), attempts to counter the aid and comfort these assumptions give to those who would construct a world in the image of economics, a world ultimately without community.

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Where Did All the Money Go? Stimulus in Fact and Fantasy

Paper Grantee paper | | Jul 2013

The Obama stimulus remains controversial even as we approach the fourth anniversary of its launch.

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General Equilibrium Theory: Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?

Article | Aug 16, 2016

Does general equilibrium theory sufficiently enhance our understanding of the economic process to make the entire exercise worthwhile, if we consider that other forms of thinking may have been ‘crowded out’ as a result of its being the ‘dominant discourse’? What, in the end, have we really learned from it?