Post-Keynesian

I know that the idea of a "natural rate" of unemployment or a non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) makes no sense. I cite, for example, James Galbraith's 1998 book, Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay. I think Colin Rogers' 1989 book is related. Jared Bernstein gives the idea of a natural rate of unemployment at the first of four examples of ideas that [mainstream] economists have gotten wrong for decades. This is not the first example of a case where Post...

Figure 1: A Pattern Diagram I have put up a working paper with the post title. Abstract: This article considers Harrod-neutral technical progress in the context of an analysis of the choice of technique. In a model of the production of commodities by means of commodities, neutral technical change is compatible with the reswitching of techniques, capital reversing, process recurrence, and the reverse substitution of labor. A taxonomy of fluke switch points is applied to an example,...

"One of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you're likely to be. In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations. We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being dialecticians." -- David Harvey, Companion to Marx's Capital: The Complete Edition. Verso (2018). I do not have children, and I am...

Carlo Milana has posted a paper on arXiv. I was prepared to accept this paper's claims. Economists have developed price theory. Referring to Sraffian "paradoxes" and "perverse" switch points is a matter of speaking. There does not exist separate Sraffian and neoclassical versions of price theory. For a result to be "perverse", it need only contradict outdated neoclassical intuition. But it is as much a part of the mathematical economics as any other result. (It is another matter that much...

[embedded content]Young Children Policing Group Members This post presents examples of psychologists inducing stress in experimental subjects, some showing why we need Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). Some of the older studies involved so much suffering that experimental subjects suffered Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I recall that at the end of the 1976 movie, The Tenth Level, about the Milgram experiment, starring William Shatner, the scientists are discussing what they would...

This post is about the misrepresentation of Sraffian capital theory in Lewin and Cachanosky (2019). I cannot recommend this short book. Presumably, it is meant as an introduction. But I do not see it as succeeding. I do not see what a more advanced audience would get out of it that is not available in a few recent papers by Lewin and Cachanosky. Before proceeding to my main theme, let me note that I agree with some parts of this book, mainly where Lewin and Cachanosky draw on Ludwig...

Figure 1: APP Around Switch Points1.0 Introduction I take it that the Austrian theory of the business cycle builds on Austrian capital theory. The following two claims are central to Austrian capital theory: Given technology, profit maximizing firms adopt a more capital-intensive, more roundabout technique at a lower interest rate. The adoption of a more roundabout technique increases output per worker. Originally, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk proposed a physical measure of the average period...

Those who understand price theory reject the theory of the Austrian Business Cycle (ABC). I am thinking here that its logical invalidity follows from post-Sraffian capital theory. It is also wrong because of its reliance on the concept of the natural rate of interest. Some years ago, I tried to get published a demonstration that ABC theory was in error. I forget how many journals rejected it. Four or five articles here are from this series of revisions. The rejections from the journals...

I have been thinking of posting a review of Quiggin's book, but this is not it. I suppose I should mention that I am in the acknowledgements. Jorge Besada raves at the Mises Institute. Peter Boettke on his blog. Tyler Cowen lists Quiggin's book in his current reading. Diane Coyle on her blog. David Gordon at the Mises Institute. Richard Holden at Inside Story. Arnold Kling on his blog. "hayekian" raves. Quiggin has a response to a couple of the above. By the way, he had a paper, in 1987,...

Figure 1: A Pattern Diagram Consider an example of the production of commodities, in which many commodities are produced within capitalist firms. Suppose two techniques are available to produce a given net output. These techniques use the same set of capital goods, albeit in different proportions. They differ in process in use for only one industry. Given the qualification about the same capital goods, generic (non-fluke) switch points are the intersection of the intersection of the wage...