Joburg is not collapsing because of coalitions or single party mayorship as it was with the ANC . The crisis of JHB is the crisis of how SA came to be as a country. JHB being the hub of economic activity and almost everyone being migrant laborers with controlled access via pass laws. Post-1994, those laws have been abolished, with our former bantustans largely underdeveloped. It's only logical everyone will want to go seek opportunities in the city. So what happens to social services? impossible. It is a "special" city. The only city in SA that cannot be fixed without fixing the economic organization in the country. Decentralize the economy from Gauteng, and you will fix Johannesburg. No mayor will fix Joburg without fixing the whole country. It's just imposible.

Very sad to hear. In 2020-2021 when I first started to seriously engage with political economy, his work was some of the first stuff I came across. Even though I was way over my head mathematically, I took a lot away from it. He also had serious aura.

Very sad to hear about the passing of Anwar Shaikh [@shaikhecon], one of my beloved professors at the @TheNewSchool. He was a prolific thinker on capitalism, and always reminded us that to truly understand economics, we must go back to classical thinkers like Marx, Ricardo and Smith. The entire discipline is better off for his contributions, and he will be sorely missed!

Anwar Shaikh has left this world. He was so clear in his thinking that he left a deep imprint on the thinking of generations of New School students and readers behind. He would always insist that we had to get the first principles right. If you start from an absurd model and then argue the world is imperfect measured against that standard from cloud cuckoo land, you have gone astray with no way to return but to start anew. He wanted to rebuild economics from scratch going back to the classics and in this process became a classic himself. It’s hard to picture economics without Anwar. As we are challenged to rebuild the basics, we need his thinking more than ever. Thank you for leaving your writing for us. May you rest in peace.

Konje wena

Nice video where Shaikh elegantly incorporates profit on alienation within the transformation from values to prices of production (a move that in his book he credits to the great mercantilist Sir James Steuart).

Author of the Humbug Production Function who showed how mathematically illiterate most economists are

In tribute to Anwar Shaikh, some hitherto unpublished comments on his most important book.

Anwar Shaikh’s brilliant teaching and scholarship helped an entire generation understand the inner logic of capitalism. He will be missed not only by colleagues and students in the field, but by the countless people whose understanding of the world was enriched by his work.

Nachgelesen: The Power of Profit Anwar Shaikh jstor.org/stable/40971701

Anwar Shaikh🤝

Hoy me despierto con la noticia de la muerte de Anwar Shaikh. Su «Capitalismo» lleva un año sobre mi escritorio, lo cogí de la estantería y no volvió. Y lo que me queda 😅 Poniéndole velitas a Michael Roberts.

Anwar Shaikh ist gestorben. Er war der wohl wichtigste lebende antikapitalistische Ökonom – weil er den Kapitalismus verstanden hatte. Und er hat dieses Wissen an Generationen weitergegeben. Das Foto hab ich 2023 auf einer Party in der @NSSRNews gemacht.

‘What’s left of the leftists?’ May you find comradeship in our pages at udadisi.com/✊🏿

My favourite story about Anwar Shaikh is how, in 1974, he literally wrote the word HUMBUG using artificial data to show that fitting a Cobb-Douglas production function does not mean that the underlying theory of production is correct. Half a century later, Isabella Sabatino turned Shaikh’s own trick against him. She wrote HUMBUG into an input-output system and still obtained a close relationship between labour values and prices, casting doubt on his empirical evidence for the labour theory of value. Then Moraitis & Basu added another twist. They showed that Sabatino’s result cannot be reduced to a simple accounting tautology. The proximity between prices and labour values can arise from the structural properties of the input-output system itself.

I had an intense discussion with a friend whose opinion is that October 7 was a strategic failure on Hamas’s part because it triggered a genocide. I disagree. Genocide is not a reaction to a provocation. The genocide expresses the nature of Israel, not the meaning of October 7

In memory of Anwar Shaikh (1945-2026) larspsyll.wordpress.com/2026… via @LarsSyll

Rest in peace Anwar Shaikh. His erudition and brilliance are the reasons why many of us are even economists. I learned everything about economics from Anwar, from Marx to Sraffa and beyond. His impact on this world has already been immense and will continue as more read his work.

RIP Anwar Shaikh Wrote essential reads such as Foreign Trade and the Law of Value (1979) and Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (2016)

So sorry to learn that Anwar Shaikh has died. I first became aware of him as a brilliant presence at the famous 1978 @NewLeftReview conference on value theory. His legacy must be his monumental book on Capitalism.

Primero fue Michel Husson, luego Simon Clarke y este año,Juan Íñigo Carrera y A. Shaikh. Los más basados de la Crítica de la Economía Política y EPOL marxista se están muriendo. Aún nos quedan Valle-Baeza, Chris Arthur, Astarita, Mattick Jr. e Isabelle Garo. Ojalá duren más.