Post-Keynesian

Samuel Bowles on how "Marx’s representation of the power relationship between capital and labour in the firm is an essential insight" Economics in the Rear-View Mirror on renewal of Paul Sweezy's instructorship. Manoucher Parvin, in 1992, asks, "Is teaching neoclassical economics as the science of economics moral?" Alexander Douglas on micro-founded macro. A review of Fredric Jameson's new book, in Jacobin earlier this month. A review of Fredric Jameson's new book, in the September...

Figure 1: Wage Curves for the Two Techniques1.0 Introduction Economists following the Austrian school often represent the structure of production with Hayekian triangles (Hayek 1931, Rothbard 1962, Skousen 1990, Garrison 2001, Machaj 2017). Typically, goods of the highest order are produced with unaided labor or other unproduced original resources. (Fillieule (2007), in which a Hayekian triangle is constructed with an infinite stream of unproduced inputs, is an exception.) Rarely, is a...

The following are the first three paragraphs of the introduction to the Wealth of Nations: "The annual labor of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations. According, therefore, as this produce, or what is purchased with it, bears a greater or smaller proportion to...

This is more for my commonplace book. The first two quotations are part of a symposium with Morishima and Samuelson: "This paper will suggest that the meaning of the relationship between values and prices described in Capital has been widely misunderstood. Commentators as eminent as Mrs. Robinson and Professor Samuelson have sought in the transformation discussion issues which Karl Marx never meant it to contain. Writers on 'the transformation problem' since L. Bortkiewicz have...

Many of my examples illustrate simple structures of production for models in which commodities are produced with commodities. Economists following the Austrian school often illustrate the structure of production with Hayekian triangles. Accordingly, this post illustrates a Hayekian triangle with a model in which commodities are produced out of commodities. I consider the case in which only circulating capital exists. This post is a rewrite of this one. The following are taken as given for...

This is for my commonplace book. "It is true that some lengthy or roundabout processes are physically efficient. But so are some short processes. Lengthy processes are not physically efficient because they are long. Some, probably most, lengthy processes would be physically very inefficient, for there are such things as spoiling or wasting with time. With a given labour force there is a definite limit to the quantity of labour embodied in roundabout processes which can be used to...

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...