Post-Keynesian

I have expressed an appreciation before of the section in Capital on commodity fetishism. Perhaps this section stands up to a critique of Marx's theory of value. "But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into...

1.0 Introduction This post illustrates a derivation of prices of production, based on certain properties of duality theory as applied to linear programming. I strive to be more concise and elementary than previous expositions. This exposition is based on John Roemer's Reproducible Solution (Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1981). You will find no utility maximization or supply and demand functions below. I have no need for such hypotheses....

I picked up the novel that the following quotation is from because I think I recall Kress participating in conversations on Usenet years ago. This novel ended up more a political argument than I expected. It is for Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), done right. We should rather strive for plants for food resistant to insects, not resistant to pesticides, for example. I assume that Kress agrees with her heroine. "He had spent the two-week winter vacation from school,...

1.0 Introduction Where do prices come from in mainstream economics? As far as I know, some hard questions were raised half a century ago. They still have not been answered, I gather. 2.0 No Agent Makes Prices Consider competitive markets, as defined in marginalist economics for most of the twentieth century. This implies that agents in the market take prices as given. From Steve Keen, I know that if only a countable infinity of consumers and firms exist, the agents are systematically...

Figure 1: Variation in the Cost-Minimizing Technique with Selected Coefficient of Production This post reports on some work with Steedman's corn-tractor model. I have yet to find an instance of triple-switching. I have found a case of reswitching, though. Figure 1 above and Table 1 below show how switch points vary with perturbations of the labor needed to produce a bushel of corn in the corn industry with Type I tractors. Only one switch point exists in region 1. Around this switch point...

Ludwig Von Mises expanded his erroneous 1920 essay into a book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. The first edition was published in 1922 and the second edition in 1932. Since Von Mises is attempting to be more comprehensive, he treats the socialist advocacy of free love in an early chapter. Being au courant, he writes about Freud. He argues that the bourgeois idea of marriage as a contract, binding on both husband and wife, is an improvement on what came before. But I...

1.0 Introduction I would like to illustrate triple switching, in the corn-tractor model, with one of my one-dimensional diagrams. I have a triple-switching example, from Bertram Schefold, but the wage-rate of profit frontier is not visually striking in it. Such an example would not be worthy of a research paper. But perhaps I could modify a section of my recent working paper to submit somewhere. Besides, posing a new problem might motivate me to update my computing technology. 2.0...

Louis-Philippe Rochon on Paul Davidson. James Galbraith, Thomas Palley, and Matias Venengo on Paul Davidson. The Economist on Donald Harris. Response in letters to the editor (Both behind paywall). The Washington Post on policy advice from Donald Harris for Jamaica (Behind paywall). Maybe I want to read Vanessa Wills' Marx's Ethical Vision, which may be in tension with views I have set out. Gordon Katic on the insidious elitist upshot of behavioral economics.

A mistaken theory claims prices convey information about relative scarcities. Friedrich Hayek uses an example of tin. According to this theory, a higher wage incentivizes investments in less labor-intensive techniques and to shifting production towards less labor-intensive commodities. Likewise, a lower interest rate incentivizes investments toward more capital-intensive techniques and to shifting production towards more capital-intensive commodities. A number of attempts have been made...

I have demonstrated that Von Mises fails to identify problems with central planning. This post merely documents Von Mises being mistaken. He erroneously says that an economic decision cannot be made over alternative methods of producing a given good, without market prices for capital goods and resources. "The director wants to build a house. Now, there are many methods that can be resorted to. Each of them offers, from the point of view of the director, certain advantages and...