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In 1983, Emmanuel Farjoun and I published our book Laws of Chaos—A probabilistic approach to political economy (Briefly: loc). Our aim was to address a long-standing difficulty in Marxian political economy, known as the transformation problem. Rather than taking sides in the dispute between ‘orthodox’ Marxists and their opponents, we maintained that the dispute itself was misconceived, as both sides shared a traditional, entrenched but fallacious basic assumption. They assumed that in a state of equilibrium the rates of profit across all firms in an entire capitalist economy converge to uniformity. The same, supposedly, applies to prices: the price of a given type of item at a given time is the same across the entire market. We argued that, on the contrary, in a state of equilibrium these and other economic quantities are not definite numbers but statistical variables (aka ‘random variables’), with definite statistical distributions. This is in fact well-established as far as some economic quantities are concerned. For example, it is nonsense to talk about ‘the’ income of a British family in a given year as if it is a single number of pounds: incomes vary, so that different numbers of families fall within different income brackets. Of course, we can talk about the average family income, but averages do not tell the whole story—far from it. (In fact, most families earn less than the average income!) However, this insight had largely been ignored in macro-economic modeling of prices and profits, including the models used by both sides in the transformation problem controversy. In retrospect, the probabilistic conceptual apparatus developed in loc has turned out to be of much wider significance than our treatment of that old transformation chestnut. Indeed, it provides a tool for analyzing central facets of global capitalism: wages, productivity, growth and accumulation. For years loc elicited little response, apart from a few mainly positive reviews. This was perhaps due to the novelty of its conceptual framework, and to its being regarded as too unorthodox by most Marxist economists. But eventually it gained a significant circle of followers—most of whom are broadly in the unorthodox wing of the Marxian tradition—who have applied its methodology to various macro aspects of the capitalist economy. Some regard loc as the seminal publication of probabilistic macro-economics, sometimes referred to as ‘econophysics’ (due to an analogy between it and statistical mechanics, a branch of theoretical physics). If “econophysics” is taken to denote the principle of applying statistical mechanics to economic analysis, as opposed to a particular literature or network, priority of innovation is probably due to Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshé Machover (1983). Their book Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy proposes dissolving (their words) the transformation problem in Marx’s political economy by re-conceptualising the relevant quantities as random variables.1 The great global economic crisis that broke out in 2007 undermined the prevalent faith in conventional economic theories promoted as incontrovertible truths by the establishment and taught in most academic departments of economics. Doubts were especially widespread among young and left-leaning people interested in economics. This no doubt helped to increase interest in probabilistic economics as advocated in loc. In the following year, Julian Wells organized a conference to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of loc. It was held at Kingston University on 14– 17 July, 2008. About 25 scholars from several parts of the world participated and presented research work related to the ideas promoted by loc. The participants included (apart from Julian Wells and the two authors): Masanao Aoki, Paul Cockshott, Allin Cottrell, Jürgen Essletzbichler, Alan Freeman, Mauro Gallegati, Steve Keen, Andrew Kliman, Paul Plummer, David Rigby, Anna Maria Variato, Michael Webber, Victor Yakovenko, and David Zachariah. Interest in probabilistic macro-economics, and with it demand for copies of loc, continued to grow. As the book was out of print, readers used PDF versions that were prepared by Julian Wells, to whom the authors and many readers are indebted. In 2017 we were told by Verso, the publishers of loc, that they were ready to publish a reprint. At first Emmanuel and I wished to add a new chapter to the reprinted edition. The original book contained a development and justification of a methodology, but no application of this methodology to the realities of the global economy, and to the central role of labor as its power source. The proposed added chapter would remedy this. But we soon realized that a single chapter could not do justice to the ideas we have developed and the empirical material collected over the years. The second edition of loc eventually came out in 2020 as a simple reprint, while we set about working on what has become the present book.