Post-Keynesian

Howard Reed argues we should rip up textbooks for mainstream economics and start over. (Some of what he says echoes an argument of mine.) I do not think Diane Coyle addresses Reed's points. Cahal Moran argues the problem is economics, not economists. Beatrice Cherrier has some frankly speculative posts on what limitations economists accepted in emphasizing tractability in developing models. Nathan Robinson does not like the word "neoliberalism", but understands there is a point to using it....

This post continues a previous numeric example. The firms in each of three countries are assumed to know a technology for producing corn, wine, and linen. The technology is such that each commodity can be produced in each country. The technology varies among countries. Each of these small open economies can specialize and obtain non-produced commodities through foreign trade. I confine myself to patterns of specialization in which: Each country produces exactly one commodity...

Figure 1: The Production Possibility Frontier, With And Without Trade, In "Germany"1.0 Introduction I continue to blunder around in parameter space in exploring my numeric example in the previous post. In this post, I continue to adopt the same assumptions for a model of three countries engaged in international trade with three produced commodities. In particular, workers are assumed to be unable to immigrate, capitalists only invest in their own country, and produced means of production...

Figure 1: The Production Possibility Frontier, With And Without Trade, In "Germany"1.0 Introduction This post presents a numeric example of a Ricardian model of small, open economies engaged in trade. Each of three countries specializes in producing one of three commodities. Technology is modeled following an Austrian approach. Each commodity can be produced in each country from inputs of labor and "capital". Endowments of labor are taken as given parameters. It makes no sense to take the...

A couple of months ago, I read Anthony Trollope's novel, The Way We Live Now. Even though the novel was written and set in England in 1870, I consider this post to be about contemporary American politics. Are any of the characters in the novel sympathetic? Maybe Lady Carbury, to a certain extent, and her cousin Roger Carbury. But I want to focus on Augustus Melmotte. Melmotte is successful in business, but is initially considered vulgar by elite socialites in London. His business...

1.0 Introduction Yoshihara and Kwak (henceforth YK) presented a paper, on Sraffian indeterminacy, at the last annual meeting for the American Economic Society. I want to register my qualified disagreement. 2.0 Yoshihara and Kwak against Mandler YK are arguing against Michael Mandler. In a 1999 paper, a book, and a series of papers since, Mandler has been criticizing Sraffa and his followers. In Mandler's reading, Sraffa argues that, in neoclassical theory, the distribution of income is...

Many - not all - of my recent numerical examples have a certain abstract pattern: At the start of the time under consideration, one technique is uniquely cost minimizing, for all feasible rates of profits. Coefficients of production decline or some markups over the normal rate of profits vary. A fluke switch point appears. Switch points move along the wage frontier, and interesting phenomena occur. These can be other fluke switch points. Reswitching, the recurrence of techniques,...

Recurrence Of Techniques Without Switch Points I have built on my previous post in a writeup: Abstract: In certain models of commodities produced by means of commodities, the choice of technique is analyzed by the construction of the wage frontier. This article presents a numeric example of a continuum of wage curves tangent at a switch point. Technological progress leads to the recurrence of techniques. No switch points then exist, but the cost-minimizing technique varies continuously...

Here are three books I have read: Paul Ormerod (1994). The Death of Economics. St. Marin's Press. Stanley Wong (1978, 2006). Foundations of Paul Samuelson's Revealed Preference Theory: A Study by the Method of Rational Reconstruction. Routledge J. E. Woods (1990). The Production of Commodities: An Introduction to Sraffa. Humanities Press. These authors have two things in common. All three were critical of some aspects of mainstream economics. And they all ended up in business. Looking at...

Figure 1: Switch Points Varying with Time1.0 Introduction This post presents a perturbation of a fluke switch point. At this switch point, the wage curves for four techniques are tangent. In the jargon I have been inventing, this is another four-technique, local pattern. In other words, a perturbation of appropriately selected parameters - for example, coefficients of production - changes the sequence of wage curves and switch points on the wage frontier. The perturbation can be viewed as...