Drawing on the work of the Austrian School and its heirs, Capital in Disequilibrium develops a modern, systematic version of capital theory in order to suggest a new approach to the subject of economics. Original and provocative in his reflection, Lewin offers both a new approach and an accessible discussion of one of the most important, but also one of the most difficult, areas in economics.

Drawing on the work of the Austrian School and its heirs, Capital in Disequilibrium develops a modern, systematic version of capital theory in order to suggest a new approach to the subject of economics. Original and provocative in his reflection, Lewin offers both a new approach and an accessible discussion of one of the most important, but also one of the most difficult, areas in economics.

For nearly 80 years, the field of macroeconomics has largely been shaped by the aftermath of the Keynesian revolution. Many economists have argued that his revolution and the subsequent internal and external disputes it has sparked have had the unfortunate side effect of crowding out much of what was good in macro-level analysis before it, leading to the dissatisfactory state of macroeconomics we have today. In the search for alternative paths for macroeconomics, I focus on two separate but compatible traditions: monetary disequilibrium theory (MDT) and the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT). I argue that scholars in these traditions employed a far richer micro-theoretic explanation for the business cycle well before Keynes's General Theory. Unfortunately, their ideas were not united in time to mount a sufficient counterattack to the Keynesian crusade. My goal is to unite the best elements of these two traditions by providing what I believe is the “missing link” that can help connect these alternative paths: free banking theory.

Economic models are almost exclusively static. The models describe equilibrium, but do not tell us the path taken to reach the equilibrium. By contrast, the model of asset pricing presented here is rarely in equilibrium; when equilibrium is reached, random forces perturb the price system away from equilibrium, which is followed by the gradual restoring force of rational traders who are attempting to earn profits from the market's miss-pricing of capital assets. Trading takes place in continuous time. The rational traders are endowed with perfect knowledge of the current value of each security. However, they face uncertainty in their market positions because in order to exploit their superior knowledge they must trade with noise traders. The market is able to “clear” through the actions of a market maker. The opportunity set for risky assets is stochastic. General as well as specific solutions to the market dynamics problem are presented. It is shown that market prices are non-negative, but not necessarily bounded from above in finite time.

Petri (University of Siena) argues that many of the problems of general equilibrium theory arose with the shift from the traditional long-period method in the study of value and distribution to the very- short-period method characteristic of contemporary theory. He asserts that mathematical economists influenced by Hick's Value and capital inherite