Ian Wright has had a blog for about six months. Scott Carter announces that Sraffa's notes for are now available online. (The announcement is good for linking to Carter's paper explaining the arrangement of the notes.) David Glasner has been thinking about intertemporal equilibrium. Brian Romanchuk questions the use of models of infinitesimal agents in economics. (Some at ejmr say he is totally wrong, but others cannot make any sense of such models, either. I am not sure if my use of a...
Read More »Price Wicksell Effects in Random Economies
Figure 1: Blowup of Distribution of Maximum Distance of Frontier from Straight Line1.0 Introduction This post is the third in a series. Here is the first, and here is the second. In this post, I am concerned with the probability that price Wicksell effects for a given technique are negative, positive, or both (for different rates of profits). A price Wicksell effect shows the change in the value of capital goods, for different rates of profits, for a technique. If a (non-zero) price...
Read More »Some Main Points of the Cambridge Capital Controversy
For the purposes of this very simplified and schematic post, I present the CCC as having two sides. Views and achievements of Cambridge (UK) critics: Joan Robinson's argument for models set in historical time, not logical time. Mathematical results in comparing long-run positions: Reswitching. Capital reversing. Empirical results and applications. Rediscovery of the logic of the Classical theory of value and distribution. Arguments about the role that a given quantity of capital plays in...
Read More »Some Resources on Neoliberalism
Here are three: Anthony Giddens, in The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1999), advocates a renewed social democracy. He contrasts what he is advocating with neoliberalism, which he summarizes as, basically, Margaret Thatcher's approach. Giddens recognizes that more flexible labor markets will not bring full employment and argues that unregulated globalism, including unregulated international financial markets, is a danger that must be addressed. He stresses the importance of...
Read More »Reversing Figure And Ground In Life-Like Celluar Automata
Figure 1: Random Patterns in Life and Flip Life1.0 Introduction I have occasionally posted about automata. A discussion with a colleague about Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science reminded me that I had started this post some time last year. This post has nothing to do with economics, albeit it does illustrate emergent behavior. And I have figures that are an eye test. I am subjectively original. But I assume somebody else has done this - that I am not objectively original. This...
Read More »Innovation and Input-Output Matrices
Figure 1: National Income and Product Accounts1.0 Introduction This post contains some speculation about technical progress. 2.0 Non-Random Innovations and Almost Straight Wage Curves The theory of the production of commodities by means of commodities imposes one restriction on wage-rate of profits curves: They should be downward-sloping. They can be of any convexity. They are high-order polynomials, where the order depends on the number of produced commodities. So no reason exists why...
Read More »Distribution of Maximum Rate of Profits in Simulation
Figure 1: Blowup of Distribution of Maximum Rate of Profits This post extends the results from my last post. I think of the results presented here as providing information about the implementation of my simulation. I do not claim any implications about actually existing economies. I did not have any definite anticipations about what I would see. I suppose it could be of interest to regenerate these results where coefficients of production are randomly generated from some non-uniform...
Read More »I Just Simulated 6 Billion Random Economies
Figure 1: Probability a Random Economy Will Be Viable I have begun working towards replicating certain simulation results reported by Stefano Zambelli's. At this point, I have implemented a capability to generate a random economy, where such an economy is characterized by a single technique. A technique is specified by a row vector of labor coefficients and a corresponding square Leontief input-output matrix. The labor coefficients are randomly generated from a uniform distribution on...
Read More »To What Extent Is Economics an Ideology and to What Extent Is It a Useful Theory?
By Philip Pilkington, a macroeconomist working in asset management and author of the new book The Reformation in Economics: A Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Economic Theory. The views expressed in this interview are not those of his employer Ever since the Enlightenment many societies have moved away from justifying their existence and formulating their aims through recourse to religious language. Gone are the days of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ which justified the natural and...
Read More »Why the Pollsters Totally Failed to Call a Trump Victory, Why I (Sort Of) Succeeded – and Why You Should Listen to Neither of Us
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the views of his employer. The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States will likely go down in history for any number of reasons. But let us leave this to one side for a moment and survey some of the collateral damage generated by the election. I am thinking of the pollsters. By all accounts these pollsters – specifically the pollster-cum-pundits – failed miserably in this election. Let us...
Read More »