Anwar Shaikh is an American Marxian economist, and currently Professor of Economics at the Graduate Faculty of The New School in New York City. His work in political economy has focused on the economic theory and empirical patterns of developed capitalism.
Education
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.
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.
Career
He has written on international trade, finance theory, political economy, U.S. macroeconomic policy, the welfare state, growth theory, inflation theory, crisis theory, inequality on the world scale, and past and current global economic crises.
Politics
His major political influences stem from the civil rights and feminist movements in the US and from progressive development movements abroad. He always found neoclassical economics unpersuasive, and the quest for more solid foundations led him to the works of Roy Harrod, Wassily Leontief, Michał Kalecki, Joan Robinson, Piero Sraffa and Luigi Pasinetti, and subsequently to Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx. The quest for a modern political economy of developed capitalism became a central theme of his subsequent work.