Costas Lapavitsas

Overview

Costas Lapavitsas (born January 20, 1961) is a Marxist political economist and professor of economics at SOAS, University of London, where he has taught since 1999, specializing in monetary theory and the political economy of money and finance.[1] He earned a master's degree at the London School of Economics (1982) and a PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London (1986), and in 2007 founded Research on Money and Finance, an international network of political economists studying finance and financialization.[1] He was briefly a member of the Hellenic Parliament for the left-wing Syriza party, elected in the January 2015 general election and serving until he defected to the Popular Unity party in August 2015 amid the Greek debt-crisis negotiations.[1]

Lapavitsas's account of "financialization of capitalism," developed in his book Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (Verso, 2013) and the article the wiki's research page summarizes, argues that financial profit increasingly arises from financial expropriation — extraction of profit directly from wage and salary income, including via mortgage debt — rather than only from the exploitation of labor in production.[2] This is a labour-value-theoretic, Marxist framework distinct from the wiki's classical land-rent analysis, cited on the FIRE sector concept page as a heterodox voice alongside Michael Hudson, and discussed as a contrast case (not corroboration) on the finance-growth-is-land-credit problem page, since his mechanism locates extraction in the debtor's wage stream rather than in appreciating land collateral.[2]

See Also

• Lapavitsas (2013): The Financialization of Capitalism — his research page on this wiki
• The FIRE Sector — cites his "financial expropriation" framework as a heterodox voice
• The growth of modern banking is largely mortgage credit against land — contrasts his wage-extraction mechanism with the wiki's land-collateral mechanism
• Financialization of Land and Housing — the broader concept his work bears on

Sources

1. Wikipedia, "Costas Lapavitsas" (biographical summary, cross-checked against the SOAS faculty profile). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costas_Lapavitsas — used for his birth year (1961), education (LSE 1982, Birkbeck PhD 1986), SOAS appointment history (lecturer 1999, professor 2008), the 2007 founding of Research on Money and Finance, and his Syriza MP term (January–August 2015, defecting to Popular Unity).
2. Wiki page Lapavitsas (2013): The Financialization of Capitalism — used for the "financial expropriation" thesis, the Profiting Without Producing book, and the wiki's own analysis distinguishing his mechanism from the land-credit literature.