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Post-Keynesian

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An applet for Marx's schemes of simple and expanded reproduction. Eli Cook, in The American Prospect says mainstream economists need to talk about profits. Simon Torracinta, in the Boston Review, decries bad (micro)economics. I should have mentioned Abraham Robinson and non-standard analysis in a previous post. Paintings by the economist Willaim Baumol. A painting by the economist Richard Goodwin. Apparently, he had a book.

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I Was Taught That Boys Need Girls And Girls Need Boys; You Say That’s Not True

I am not a biologist. In this world of 8 billion people, not all are men or women, where a man has XY chromosomes and a woman has XX chromosomes. When fraternal twins are conceived, these two balls of cells may clump together, and one person develops. Such a human chimera may have a mixture of cells that are both XX and XY. The SRY gene may cross over from a Y to an X chromosome. And so some men may grow up with XX chromosomes. Klinefelter syndrome occurs in men with XXY chromosomes....

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Some Stories About Math And Science

I find certain stories of achievements in mathematics and science intriguing. In some of those I select, much that came before was overthrown. At any rate, these are stories about creations of the human mind that are tough to wrap your head around. I only claim to understand the last story. Fermat's last theorem lacked a proof for three and a half centuries. When he first saw the theorem as a school boy, Andrew Wiles decided he was going to be a mathematican when he grew up and prove it....

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The Spread Of Marxism: A Riddle

Karl Marx died on 14 March 1883. Less than 15 people attended his funeral, and Engels gave an eulogy. Marxists existed, a century later, in every country on the face of this planet, and most had political parties, some powerful, that claimed to follow Marx. How did this change from obscurity to world-wide recognition come about? What did Marx have to say that was so persuasive? If economics were a serious subject, these questions would be explored within academic economics departments....

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A Theorem for Capital-Reversing

Figure 1: The Wage Frontier for a Numeric Example of a Real Wicksell Effect of Zero Theorem: Consider a model of an economy in which n commodities are produced by means of commodities. Let Alpha be a technique in which each of the n commodities is produced by a fixed-coefficients, constant-returns-to-scale process. Suppose the Beta technique differs from Alpha only in the process operated in the nth industry. For simplicity, assume all n commodities are Sraffian basics in both techniques....

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Reminder: Wages, Employment Not Determined By Supply And Demand For Labor

Figure 1: The Wage as Functions of Employment by Industry1.0 Introduction This post repeats a common theme of mine. It builds on an example I have previously gone on about. I use this example to graph, given the wage, the amount of labor firms would like to employ in each industry, per unit of gross output in each industry. These graphs are derived for an economy in which three commodities are produced: iron, steel, and corn. I also graph the amount of labor firms would like to employ...

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A Theorem For The Reverse Substitution Of Labor

Figure 1: The Wage Frontier for a Numeric Example Theorem: Consider a model of an economy in which n commodities are produced by means of commodities. Let Alpha be a technique in which each of the n commodities is produced by a fixed-coefficients, constant-returns-to-scale process. Suppose the Beta technique differs from Alpha only in the process operated in the nth industry. For simplicity, assume all n commodities are Sraffian basics in both techniques. Let both techniques undergo...

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New York City Subway: A Parable

A number of years ago, I was in the subway station under Times Square in New York City. I must have looked lost, because this fellow came up to me and asked me where I was going. I said, "A bookstore, The Strand. I like to see what they have in their economics section. I am trying to decide if I should take the cross-town shuttle and go south from Grand Central." He said, "I am an economist myself. You can have this subway map." And he handed me a map of the tube in London. "This map...

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