Shost, was Shaikh worth reading in the end? I downloaded a sample on Kindle and it looked like a lot of neo ricardian formula dork shit. I'm not opposed to that but it's not a priority 
It really depends. This is 800 pages of dense and often tedious material. I would say it took 30 hours of my life away, and that's even with skimming a couple of chapters. Some of the earlier chapters especially get into that "formula dork shit" you're talking about; my eyes glazed over during the chapter on reducing prices to dated quantities of labor. That said, I was very impressed with the thoroughness of the presentation and especially the format: every chapter presents a topic or problem, provides a brief overview of what various schools propose (usually the dominant neoclassical and post-keynesian treatments), presents what he calls the "classical" version, and then very often offers convincing and systematic empirical evidence. As a post-keynesian fanboy it was kind of sad seeing authors I like being shit all over but the targets are usually justified... profits are not stable markups, there is no such thing as "degree of monopoly power", there's no correlation between concentration and profits, capacity utilization is not a free variable, and so on. There is also a huge amount of historical content in here that was very interesting to read. As for original content, this is by no means thorough, but off the top of my head, I enjoyed the consistent and empirical microfoundations, the detailed analysis of Ricardo's comparative advantage (and why Krugman sucks), the return of the Philips Curve
, and a modification of Harrodian growth theory that doesn't have the knife edge problem.
It's severely lacking in some serious respects, though. For one thing there isn't any treatment of some of the most interesting debates in modern economics. There isn't anything on financialization, his whole chapter on interest rates is literally irrelevant for economies with central banks, for all the gloating about how much better he is than post-keynesians there was nothing on the dynamics of debt, and he wrote nothing about secular stagnation even though this was released in 2016, 5 years after it was apparent we were in such a state. So all that buildup for so little delivery imo.
anyway tbh don't read it, it's a big waste of time. he should have just written a straight book about his philosophy without the polemic or debate or the entire chapter saying chartalism is wrong.
one final thought. He says in interviews that he wanted to completely redo development economics but before he could analyze capitalism in the periphery he had to analyze capitalism in the developed world. So last week I emailed him and I politely asked if he was working on a book on development economics. Instead he linked me to some paper he wrote two years ago and it was just general shit he cribbed from his book. Motherfucker!
