Anwar Shaikh

Anwar Mir Mohammed Shaikh was born on 22 October 1945 in Karachi, British India (now Pakistan), into a liberal Sindhi family of mixed Muslim and Christian background. Because his father worked in the Foreign Service of Pakistan, the family moved often, and he lived for periods in Ankara, Washington, D.C., New York City, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur and Kuwait.

He attended a French school in Ankara from the age of six, the Catholic St. Patrick's High School in Karachi from the age of eight, and a school in Washington from 1958. In a 2021 interview with Historical Materialism he said that living in so many countries made the huge differences in development obvious to him, and that explaining those differences was the question that eventually drew him to economics.

Shaikh graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1961 and earned a B.S.E. in engineering from Princeton University in 1965. As a Princeton student he attended talks by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

After two years working in Kuwait (1965 to 1967), first as a bank clerk and engineer and then as a teacher of mathematics, physics and social science at the Kuwait-American School, he returned to the United States to study economics at Columbia University. There he took courses with Gary Becker, William Vickrey, Kelvin Lancaster, Alexander Ehrlich and Carl Riskin, read Robert Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers, and was mentored by the Cambridge economists Joan Robinson and Luigi Pasinetti. He completed his Ph.D. in 1973 under Ronald Findlay with a thesis titled Theories of Value and Theories of Distribution.

Shaikh joined the economics department of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research as an adjunct in 1972 and was appointed full time in 1973. Over five decades he taught international trade, the history of economic thought, classical political economy, growth and cycles, theories of inflation and many other courses.

In 1974 he published his celebrated critique of the aggregate production function, "Laws of Production and Laws of Algebra: The Humbug Production Function", in The Review of Economics and Statistics. In 1977 he became one of the original eighteen editors of the Cambridge Journal of Economics. His 1978 essay "An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theories" and his 1979 work on foreign trade and the law of value became widely read on the left.

With Ahmet Tonak he wrote Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts (1994). He edited Globalization and the Myths of Free Trade (2007). From 2000 to 2005 he was a Senior Scholar and member of the Macro Modeling Team at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, alongside Wynne Godley.

His magnum opus, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford University Press, 2016), took almost twenty years to write. It integrated Smith, Ricardo, Marx and Keynes into one framework built around real competition and turbulent regulation, with roughly half the book devoted to empirical evidence. He later called the approach Real Economic Analysis and lectured on it at Oxford, Cambridge, SOAS, UMass Amherst and elsewhere. He retired as University in Exile Professor Emeritus of Economics in December 2022 after fifty years at the New School.

Shaikh was known to friends as "Anu". While a graduate student he and his wife lived in an apartment in Harlem, where he taught at Harlem Prep, met Catholic nuns involved in education, and came to know members of the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam. He recalled riding a Yamaha 305 motorcycle from Harlem to the New School for two years, with long hair down to his waist. His wife's name and details of any children have not been made public.

Shaikh argued that neither neoclassical economics nor most heterodox schools offered an adequate foundation for understanding capitalism, because both depended on the theory of perfect competition. In its place he proposed real competition, competition as a war between firms that set prices and cut costs, and turbulent regulation, in which prices, wages and profit rates constantly overshoot and undershoot moving centres of gravity.

He held that capitalist growth is driven by profitability, that crises arise from inside the system rather than from outside shocks, and that pollution and other so-called externalities are internal to the logic of profit. Politically he was shaped by the New Left, the civil rights and feminist movements and national liberation struggles, and he described the Chicago Boys' role in Pinochet's Chile as a crime against humanity.

Shaikh trained generations of New School economists and influenced scholars around the world. Former students include Mariana Mazzucato, and colleagues described him as one of the greatest Marxian economists of his time. The economist J. E. King wrote that if there were any justice in economics, Shaikh would have won the Nobel Memorial Prize for the humbug production function.

The final volume of the German Edition Marxismen series, edited by Ingar Solty, was devoted to his work on the labour theory of value. His long YouTube lecture series, including courses at the Henry George School and UMass Amherst, continue to be used as teaching tools.

NordSud International Prize for Literature and Science, Fondazione Pescarabruzzo, Italy (2014). Intellectual biography included in Eminent Economists II: Their Life and Work Philosophies, Cambridge University Press (2014). Chinese edition of Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises named a 2021 Financial Book of the Year by China Business Network (Yicai) and J.P. Morgan. University in Exile Professor Emeritus of Economics, The New School. A conference, Competition, Conflict and Crises: A Celebration of the Economics of Anwar Shaikh, held at the New School in April 2024.

Major works: "Laws of Production and Laws of Algebra: The Humbug Production Function" (1974); "An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theories" (1978); Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts, with Ahmet Tonak (1994); Globalization and the Myths of Free Trade, editor (2007); Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (2016); Valor, acumulación y crisis. Ensayos de economía política (2024).

He gave widely viewed interviews to the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Jacobin and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, and recorded full lecture courses on his book that remain on YouTube.

Anwar Shaikh died on 6 October 2026, at the age of 80. His friend and co-author Ahmet Tonak announced the news late on 6 October (US Eastern time), writing that "Anu died tonight". New School colleague Paulo L. dos Santos confirmed the next day that the department had lost "our colleague and friend Anwar Shaikh yesterday". Some sources give 7 October, the date the news spread internationally. The place and cause of death were not made public. Tributes came from Mariana Mazzucato, Isabella Weber, Alex Callinicos, John Cassidy and Jacobin, among many former students.