Nobuo Okishio

Who was Nobuo Okishio?

Nobuo Okishio was a Japanese Marxian economist and emeritus professor of Kobe University. In 1979, he was elected President of the Japan Association of Economics and Econometrics, which is now called Japanese Economic Association.

Okishio studied mathematical economics under Kazuo Mizutani. In 1950 he graduated from Kobe University and later taught there. He soon began to doubt the premises and results of modern economics, and decided to search for alternatives by studying Marxian economics.

Okishio worked to clarify the logic of Karl Marx’s economic system, offering formal and mathematical proofs for many Marxian theorems. For example, in 1955, he gave the world's first proof of the “Marxian fundamental theorem”, as it was later named by Michio Morishima, which is the theory that the exploitation of surplus labor is the necessary condition for the existence of positive profit. Concerning Marx’s Falling Rate of Profit, Okishio considered that his famous theorem would not deny it.

Okishio wrote many papers covering various important fields in modern and Marxian economics, for example value and price, accumulation theory, critical analysis of Keynesian economics, trade cycle theory and on the long run tendency of capitalistic economy. They were published in over twenty books and two hundred papers, almost all in Japanese. About thirty of his published papers have been translated in English, and much of these materials are collected in the book .