[embedded content]The Start Of This Video Is An Anecdote About George Dantzig1.0 Introduction Ludwig Von Mises popularized the Socialist Calculation Problem and brought it to wider attention. (This problem is also known as the Economic Calculation Problem.) In Von Mises' 1920 paper, he argues rational economic planning is impossible without market prices for capital goods and unproduced resources. Thus, anybody advocating socialism is advocating a system that cannot obtain a high material...
Read More »Correspondence Among Marxists
I have been (re?-)transcribing various letters in which various points of Marxism are elaborated. This post is an index of what I have so far. I do not know that I will go on much. Marx to Engels, 2 August 1862, sets out the transformation problem and Marx's solution. Marx to Engels, 18 June 1867, on the order of presentation in Capital. Marx to Engels, 24 August 1867, on the two best points in volume 1 of Capital. Marx to Engels, 8 January 1868, on three original points in volume 1...
Read More »On My Research Program With Fluke Switch Points
I have a research program that I have been pursuning for several years. And I seem to be able to go on for several more years. I have been looking at the analysis of the choice of technique in models of the production of commodities by means of commodities. Fluke cases are characterized as losing their qualitative properties with almost any perturbation of the parameters of the model. The parameter spaces in these models are partitioned by these fluke cases. Within a region formed by the...
Read More »Intensive Rent, Extensive Rent, And Absolute Rent
1.0 Introduction I have decided that this previous post is inadequate. If intensive rent exists on some type of land, the system of equations for prices of production cannot include a process that only partially cultivates some other type of land producing the agricultural commodity. So to form an example with both intensive and extensive rent, I need the technology to specify the possibility of cultivating at least three types of land. I might as well include markup pricing so as to...
Read More »Elsewhere
[embedded content]Randall Wray on MMT. (About 40:55: Most economics is "fraud". Lots of ads.)Jason Blakely, Doctor's orders: COVID-19 and the new science wars, in Harper's Matias Vernengo of Bidenomics. Economists in Chicago cannot stomach the slightest dissent on antitrust. Mario Tronti, 24 July 1931 - 7 August 2023. A republished essay in New Left Review. Deepankar Basu, 2022. A Reformulated Version of Marx’s Theory of Ground-Rent Shows that there Cannot be any Absolute Rent....
Read More »Some Assertions Of Marx And Some Remarks On The Labor Theory Of Value
1.0 Introduction I have been reading fools in other parts of the Internet. Hence this post. 2.0 Assertions Marx says the following (I am least sure of 6): Both sides to an exchange gain. (Capital, volume 1, chapter 5) Nobody, neither consumers, nor workers, nor investors, nor the managers of firms, make decisions on the grounds of the labor time embodied in commodities. (Capital, volume 1, chapter 1, section4) Surplus value (dividends, interest, rent, etc.), in an ideal competitive...
Read More »Marx: Labor Is NOT The Source Of All Wealth
I think most quote the first page of the Critique of the Gotha Program for Marx asserting this: "First part of the paragraph: 'Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture.' Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct...
Read More »A Fluke Case And The Disappearance Of Intensive Rent
Figure 1: Wage Curves For A Fluke Case1.0 Introduction This post examines perturbations around a fluke case in a model of intensive rent. The model illustrates an analysis of prices and the choice of technique in which the quantity of commodites produced matters. Yet the level and composition of net output are taken as given, independent of any variation, for example, from their dependence on distribution and relative prices. The model also illustrates a case in which prices of production...
Read More »Engels To Conrad Schmidt In 1890
This is another example of Engels explaining the theory of historical materialism. I know of this letter from Mills and Goldstick (1989). They also point out this letter from Engels. Here we see the metaphor of ideas "standing on their head", not in relation to Hegel's idealism, but as real economic relations reflected in finance. I like the emphasis on the interdependence of industries that could be expressed in Leontief matrices. Does this letter express a deterministic, strict dependence...
Read More »Prices In An Example Of The Life Of A Machine
Figure 1: Structural Economic Dynamics of the Price of a New Machine I am not sure that there is any great insight here. But this post depicts the evolution of prices in an example which I have been explaining in two posts. For some parameters, I have found that a shorter economic life of a machine may be associated with a more capital-intensive technique around a switch point. This can occur at both a 'normal' and a 'perverse' switch point. This finding raises difficulties for tradional...
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