Faculty

Profile

Paulo dos Santos is Associate Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research.

I am a mathematical political economist. My research engages with the social content of market outcomes and institutional structures in contemporary capitalism, and with the development of robust formalisms that can enable conceptual and observational work on these areas. This includes work on economic and mathematical methodology, the use of concepts and tools from information theory in social inquiry, the measurement of inequality in economic outcomes, and on central themes in Classical political economy. I am also interested in more immediately pertinent areas of research, like the nature and content of contemporary financial systems and relations; "financial inclusion;" the functioning and problems of the present international monetary system; and the economic effects of systems of racial, ethnic, and gender subordination.

Across all these areas, my work seeks to contribute to the development of an observationally grounded, critical political economy of contemporary capitalism--by drawing on new data, formal methods, and analytical instruments, to shed light on the ways today’s market economies reproduce consequential aggregate relationships between definite social groups. 

Degrees Held

PhD Economics, University of London

MSc Economics, London School of Economics

B.A. Economics, University of Maryland, College Park

B.S. Mathematics, University of Maryland, College Park

Recent Publications

"Statistical Equilibria in Economic Systems: Socio-Combinatorial or Individualist-Reductionist Characterizations?" European Physical Journal - Special Topics (forthcoming).

"Capital Mobility, Quasi-Rents, and the Competitive Self-Organization of Distributions of Profitability," Advances in Complex Systems (forthcoming)

"By the Content of Their Character? Discrimination, Social Identity, and Observed Distributions of Income," The Journal of Mathematical Sociology (2019), with Noe Wiener. 

"Competition, Self-Organization, and Social Scaling--Accounting for the Observed Distributions of Tobin's q," Industrial and Corporate Change (2019), with Ellis Scharfenaker.

"Indices of Informational Association and Analysis of Complex Socio-Economic Systems," Entropy, with Noe Wiener (2019).

“The Principle of Social Scaling,” Complexity (2017).

“Better Than Cash, But Beware the  Costs: Electronic Payments Systems and Financial Inclusion in Developing Countries,” Development and Change, with Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven (2017).

"The Distribution and Regulation of Tobin's q", Economic Letters, with Ellis Scharfenaker (2015).

"Not ‘wage-led’ versus ‘profit-led’, but investment-led versus consumption-led growth", Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics, (2015).

“A Note on Credit Allocation, Income Distribution, and the Circuit of Capital”, Metroeconomica, (2014)

“Distribución del crédito, rentabilidad y estabilidad”, Ensayos Económicos, Banco Central de la República Argentina, (2013).

“A Cause for Policy Concern: The Expansion of Household Credit in Middle-Income Economies”, International Review of Applied Economics, (2013).

“A Policy Wrapped in ‘Analysis’—The World Bank’s Case for Foreign Banks”, in K Bayliss, B Fine and E Van Waeyenberge (eds), The Political Economy of Development: The World Bank, Neoliberalism and Development Research, (Pluto, 2012)

“Option Pricing Models—A plurally heterodox note”, in J Toporowski and J Michell, Handbook of Critical Issues in Finance, (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

“Production and Consumption Credit in a Continuous-Time Model of the Circuit of Capital”, Metroeconomica, (2011).

“On the Content of Banking in Contemporary Capitalism”, Historical Materialism, (2009).

“Globalization and Contemporary Banking: On the Impact of New Technology”, Contributions to Political Economy, (2008).