Post-Keynesian

I read Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time years ago. I find its thesis on the first passage of the first chapter: "Nineteenth-century civilization rested on four institutions. The first was the balance-of-power system which for a century prevented the occurrence of any long and devastating war between the Great Powers. The second was the international gold standard which symbolized a unique organization of world economy. The third was...

We live, dead to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches. But where there’s so much as half a conversation The Kremlin's mountaineer will get his mention. His fingers are fat as grubs, And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his mouth. His cockroache whiskers leer And his boot tops gleam. Around him a rabble of ring-necked leaders - Fawning half men for him to play with. They whinny, purr or whine. As he prates and points a finger. One by one...

Girardi, Mamunuru, Halliday, and Bowles investigate, does studying economics make you selfish? In contrast to earlier research, they conclude no. Angus Deaton, in his book Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality apparently says, "A reader might be forgiven for thinking we are scoundrels concerned only with our own financial gain." Apparently, the Rochdale Principles were set out in 1844 in Rochdale, England, as principles for running cooperatives....

My article with the post title is now available at the Bulletin of Political Economy (Volume 16, issue 2, pp. 133-146). The abstract follows: Abstract: This article presents an example of the reswitching of the order of fertility and of the order of rentability. Whether or not these orders differ from one another varies with distribution for certain parameter ranges in the example. This analysis emphasizes that more rent per acre is not necessarily associated with more fertile land and...

These posts demonstrate, in a model of fixed capital, that the cost-minimizing choice of the economic life of a machine need not conform to traditional Austrian and marginalist theory. The cost-minimizing choice of technique around a switch point might associate a shorter economic life of a machine with an increased capital intensity. This counter-intuitive variation of the economic life of a machine is independent of capital reversing and the re-switching of techniques, both of which are...

[embedded content]If you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you are sitting Suppose one wants to discuss capitalism versus socialism or some smaller matter. One might think the discipline of political economy, now known as economics would be helpful. But it is not. What is taught in most universities in the United States was shown to be nonsense more than half a century ago. I find it hard to account for this except on the grounds of political ideology. I realize...

Figure 1: Convergence of Newton Method This post steps through an algorithm for finding a fluke switch point. I used a different example when I tried to explain this before. Today, I use an example building on my draft ROPE Article. Consider Figure 3 in this post, repeated below as Figure 2. Let s1 = s2 = 1. I want to find s3, the markup in the corn industry, such that the wage curves for Gamma, Delta, Eta, and Theta intersect at a single switch point. One wants to find a function one of...

This post echos another quotation from somebody who understands something about how rewards are distributed under capitalism. "In every other country capitalism, competitive and monopolistic, displays the same defects and applies similar political and economic remedies in order to save its life from the new revolutionary attacks of socialism and communism. Regarded more narrowly from my own standpoint of criticism, what has occurred is a display and condemnation of the unequal and unfair...

Figure 1: Variation of the Technique with Markup in Agriculture This post is a continuation a of a previous example. I suppose this is the first example in post Sraffian price theory which combines intensive rent and markup pricing. I do not plan on trying to publish it, in a stand-alone article. D'Agata (1983) sets some coefficients to zero to simplify it for his purposes. I would like a range of parameters where I get reswitching or capital-reversing. I have found a case where, given the...

Figure 1: Wage Curves and Rent for an Example of Intensive Rent This post is a continuation of a previous example. This is a fluke case insofar as the Alpha and Delta wage curves intersect at the scale factor for the rate of profits that is the maximum possible for the Epsilon technique. This fluke case is associated with a qualitative change in the range of the scale factor for the rate of profits in which no cost-minimizing technique exists. The technology, endowments, requirements...