Robert Gilpin
Robert Gilpin is a scholar of International Political Economy and the professor emeritus of Politics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
I was certain that I was not a Marxist, but I did believe firmly that a connection between economics and politics existed.
Japanese refer to Europe as a "museum" and America as a "farm."
Specialization makes the welfare of the society vulnerable to the market and to political forces beyond national control.
When once asked what was missing from his classic textbook, Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson is reported to have responded, "the class struggle."
These two opposed forms of social organization, the modern state and the market, have evolved together through recent centuries, and their mutual interactions have become increasingly crucial to the character and dynamics of international relations in our world.
In the abstract world of American economists, equations run both ways; they believe that by changing the sign of a variable from plus to minus or from minus to plus or the price and quantity of x or y, the direction of historical movement can be reversed.
In many societies the domestic social costs of adjustment to changing patterns of comparative advantage are believed to outweigh the advantages of further trade liberalization.
Among the many factors that make a return to halcyon days of the first decades of the postwar era virtually impossible is the decline of clearly defined political leadership.
The dreams of "leaving it up to the market" or of returning to a politically neutral gold standard cannot succeed because the nature of the monetary system has a profound impact on the interests of powerful groups and states. Affected groups and states will always try to intervene in the operation of the system to make it serve their interests.
The core of the Marxist critique of capitalism is that although the individual capitalist is rational (as liberals assume), the capitalist system itself is irrational.
One reason for the primacy of the market in shaping the modern world is that it forces a reorganization of society in order to make the market work properly . When a market comes into existence, as Marx fully appreciated, it becomes a potent force driving social change.
Liberal economists conceive of societies as black boxes connected by exchange rates; as long as exchange rates are correct, what goes on inside the black box is regarded as not very important.
The historical record suggests that the transition to to a new hegemon has always been attended by what I have elsewhere called hegemonic war.
The world economy diffuses rather than concentrates wealth.
There is a pressing need to integrate the study of international economics with the study of international politics to deepen our comprehension of the forces at work in the world.
Does the functioning of the world economy tend to concentrate wealth and power, or does it tend to diffuse it?
In short, the elimination of the financial legacy of Reaganomics could force the United States to make some exceptionally difficult choices indeed.
The multinational corporation and international production reflect a world in which capital and technology have become increasingly mobile, while labor has remained relatively immobile.
Many critics see international trade as a form of cultural imperialism that must be strictly controlled.
A prolonged and massive increase in aggregate wealth per capita has taken place over several centuries.