E. Ahmet Tonak remembers Anwar Shaikh through the intellectual friendships and research he made possible. After leaving Turkey following the 1971 military coup, Tonak expected to return to journalism. Meeting Shaikh at the New School in 1975 redirected his life toward Marxist economics.
- Tonak became Shaikh’s first paid teaching and research assistant. Their collaboration eventually produced Measuring the Wealth of Nations in 1994.
- Shaikh worked to translate Marx’s categories into quantities researchers could estimate from national accounts, bringing arguments about exploitation into contact with evidence.
- Their “net social wage” measures expenditures on labor income minus taxes on labor income. It asks what workers receive from the state after accounting for what they pay.
- Tonak also follows Shaikh’s concept of “profit on alienation,” exploring gains from transfers and exchange through research on privatization and banks’ claims on workers’ incomes.
- The essay closes with a factory worker’s account of reading Shaikh during night-shift breaks, then studying economics to understand and extend his work.
Tonak gives intellectual history a human scale: encouragement in an office, papers passed from hand to hand, and research questions taken up by another generation. A teacher’s influence travels through the people who find themselves able to do work they once thought beyond reach.
The politics runs through the method. Claims about welfare, exploitation, and finance become stronger when researchers show how to measure them and leave others the tools to test them.