Post-Keynesian

These posts demonstrate, in a model of fixed capital, that the cost-minimizing choice of the economic life of a machine need not conform to traditional Austrian and marginalist theory. The cost-minimizing choice of technique around a switch point might associate a shorter economic life of a machine with an increased capital intensity. This counter-intuitive variation of the economic life of a machine is independent of capital reversing and the re-switching of techniques, both of which are...

[embedded content]If you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you are sitting Suppose one wants to discuss capitalism versus socialism or some smaller matter. One might think the discipline of political economy, now known as economics would be helpful. But it is not. What is taught in most universities in the United States was shown to be nonsense more than half a century ago. I find it hard to account for this except on the grounds of political ideology. I realize...

Figure 1: Convergence of Newton Method This post steps through an algorithm for finding a fluke switch point. I used a different example when I tried to explain this before. Today, I use an example building on my draft ROPE Article. Consider Figure 3 in this post, repeated below as Figure 2. Let s1 = s2 = 1. I want to find s3, the markup in the corn industry, such that the wage curves for Gamma, Delta, Eta, and Theta intersect at a single switch point. One wants to find a function one of...

This post echos another quotation from somebody who understands something about how rewards are distributed under capitalism. "In every other country capitalism, competitive and monopolistic, displays the same defects and applies similar political and economic remedies in order to save its life from the new revolutionary attacks of socialism and communism. Regarded more narrowly from my own standpoint of criticism, what has occurred is a display and condemnation of the unequal and unfair...

Figure 1: Variation of the Technique with Markup in Agriculture This post is a continuation a of a previous example. I suppose this is the first example in post Sraffian price theory which combines intensive rent and markup pricing. I do not plan on trying to publish it, in a stand-alone article. D'Agata (1983) sets some coefficients to zero to simplify it for his purposes. I would like a range of parameters where I get reswitching or capital-reversing. I have found a case where, given the...

Figure 1: Wage Curves and Rent for an Example of Intensive Rent This post is a continuation of a previous example. This is a fluke case insofar as the Alpha and Delta wage curves intersect at the scale factor for the rate of profits that is the maximum possible for the Epsilon technique. This fluke case is associated with a qualitative change in the range of the scale factor for the rate of profits in which no cost-minimizing technique exists. The technology, endowments, requirements...

An appreciation of Rob A. Bryer, a Marxist scholar of accounting. I stumbled upon a You Tube channel and web site for the International Marxist Tendency. I do not know what I think about variants of Trotskyism. Alessandro Roncaglia contrasts theories of crises in which tendencies exist in competitive markets towards equilibrium and in which such tendencies need not exist. Some have YouTube channels trying to explain the strange ideas that mathematicians have come up with: An Infinite...

It seems to me that mainstream economists are socialized into ignorance and anti-scholarly norm. Plenty of economists exist that so many economists dismiss as 'fringe', and yet these dismissed economists excel on any scholarly criteria. It is not just that mainstream economists do not know of vast bodies of scholarship, produced by academics around the world. They also do not know that what they believe has long ago been shown to be without foundation. I have gone on like this before. I...

Figure 1: Wage Curves and Rent for an Example of Intensive Rent The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, 'This is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes, might not anyone have saved mankind by pulling up the stakes, filling in the ditch, and crying to his fellows, 'Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if...

We compare the conditions of two isolated market systems A and B. Both are equal in size and population figures, the state of technological knowledge, and in natural resources. They differ from one another only in the supply of capital goods, this supply being larger in A than in B. This enjoins that in A many processes of production are employed with which the output is greater per unit of input than with those employed in B. In B one cannot consider the adoption of these processes on...