Post-Keynesian

Figure 1: Extensive Rent Example As Relative Market Power Varies Between Industry And Agriculture This post is an elaboration on this past post. The analysis of the choice of technique varies with perturbations of relative markups in industry and agriculture. Figure 1 depicts this variation, while Figure 2 is an enlargement of the lower range of the relative markup in industry. The heavy solid lines in Figure 1, other than the horizontal line at the top, are switch points on the inner...

The following is a list of publications I expect to see in the first volume of Sraffa's collected works: Monetary inflation in Italy during and after the war (This is Sraffa's dissertation). The current situation of Italian banks. Manchester Guardian. 1922. The bank crises in Italy. Economic Journal. 1922. On the relations between cost and quantity produced. Annali di economia 1925. (I think an English translation is in the Cambridge Journal of Economics.) The laws of returns under...

Figure 1: Choice of Technique with Extensive Rent and Competitive Markets1.0 Introduction I am making some slow progress on recreating past posts. For variation, I here take the wage as given. If I write this up more formally, I intend not to try to relate it to Marx's concept of absolute rent. The point is to illustrate the following comment with long-lasting variations in market power between industry and agriculture: "The complexity of the outcomes with the potential existence of...

This is another post for my commonplace book. It is extraordinary difficult to get a rational explanation for the marginal revolution. Trying to imitate nineteenth-century physics seems to be part of it. "Marx implicitly assumes the the whole of social reproduction is mediated through the exchange of commodities, including the reproduction of labor power, that is, the reproduction of people themselves. We can view the labor that produces what productive workers consume as the labor...

Here is a list of books by Marxists that have stood the test of time. I am being impressionistic and probably idiosyncratic. I am more interested in analysis of what is than political organizing. What should be added? Removed? Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1877. I think German comrades learned Marxism during the second international more from this thick tome. I recommend other works for introductions these days. Vladimir Lenin, What is to be Done?, 1902. Lenin lays out a strategy and...

This post is for my commonplace book. I have been reading Enrico Bellino and Gabriel Brondino's "Circular vs. one-way production processes: two different views on production and income distribution" (Review of Political Economy, 2024). Bellino and Brondino draw a distinction between a circular model of production and a one-way model. In the latter, a finite, dated series of non-produced inputs (for example, labor) results in the production of the output. This dichotomoy is distinct from...

Figure 1: Hayekian Triangles for The Two Techniques1.0 Introduction This post is a variation on this one. 2.0 Technology and Net Output Suppose technology is as characterized by the coefficients of production in Table 1. All techniques are characterized by single production, no fixed capital, and no joint production. In the Alpha technique, the first corn-producing process is operated. The second corn-producing process is operated in the Beta technique. The ale-producing process is...

Paul Kengor's The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration is a stupid and ignorant book. Kengor is particularly keen to chronicle atheist attacks from Marx and communists on religion. Juvenile Literary Works from Marx Kengor starts with a poem that Marx wrote when he was 19. Marx envisions himself, I guess, as a ferocious violin player, inspired by the devil. Apparently, Marx was a fan of Goethe. Kengor never uses the phrase 'sturm und drang'. He...

1.0 Introduction I resolutely am not commenting on unhappy current events. Smith and Ricardo thought a (simple) LTV was not applicable to capitalism. Prices do not tend to or orbit around labor values. At least that is their claim. Ricardo had more to say about the LTV. This argument is not new. Smith confined the LTV to a supposed "early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation on land" (WoN, book 1, chapter 6; see also book 1,...

Hayek introduced his triangles in his lectures for his book Prices and Production. The first edition was in 1931 and the second in 1935. He attempted a more general treatment of capital theory in his 1941 book, The Pure Theory of Capital. I want to claim that Hayek knew that he could not draw his triangles under these more general assumptions. And that he knew that capital theory needed more development than he was able to give. Jack Birner knows this, although I do not know a reference...