Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

Jacobin is a recent, popular socialist magazine in the United States. I think the editor is Bhaskar Sunkara. Doubtless, some of you will have objections to some of the politics of some of their writers or interpretations of various things. One nice aspect of their magazine is that they provide profiles and write ups of lesser known historical figures and events in the past. Some of these are academics writing on their speciality. Some are book reviews. I have gathered together some...

Figure 1: A Part of a Parameter Space This post revisits my numerical examples in which I demonstrate the possibility of the reswitching of the order of fertility and of the reswitching of the order of rentability. Each of those posts presents a numeric example. In each, different ranges of the coefficients of production a0,2 and a1,2 are considered. This post combines those ranges, while still not considering the full parameter space, even for the slice for these coefficients. In the...

1.0 Introduction Here are some attempts to step back, but not very far, from some of the details in my numeric examples. 2.0 Henry George and Piero Sraffa Henry George's book Progress and Poverty misrepresents classical political economy. I cannot justify this claim, since I read George's book more than a decade ago. But George and his followers are absolutely correct on a couple of points. Marginalism developed by extending the theory of intensive rent, as in David Ricardo's...

Figure 1: Wage and Rent Curves for a Numeric Example1.0 Introduction This post continues, with some repitition, my exposition of a model of extensive and intensive rent. In the example, the cost-minimizing technique is non-unique at a low enough wage or rate of profits. One cost-minimizing technique, Epsilon, illustrates a case of extensive rent. The other cost-minimizing technique, Iota, illustrates a case with both extensive and intensive rent. In this technique, a kind of absolute rent...

1.0 Introduction Kurz and Salvadori (1995) explain prices of production with two methods of analysis: the direct method and the indirect method. The indirect method, for the circular capital case, involves the creation of the wage frontier, the most well-known diagram to come out of Sraffa (1960). The direct method characterizes a system of prices of production by axioms, while the indirect method suggests algorithms for finding cost-minimizing techniques. 2.0 The Direct Method In both...

I think of Gramsci or Lukacs as the authors to read for understanding why Marxism might be called a "philosophy of praxis". Apparently, that phrase was first used by Antonio Labriola. His collection of letters to Georges Sorel was published as Socialism and Philosophy. In the following letter, "praxis" is translated as "practice" in the last two paragraphs. Rome, May 14, 1897 To return to my first argument, it seems to me that the following question is uppermost in your...

This post continues the treatment of this model. A number of conditions must be satisfied by quantity flows and prices to allow the economy to undergo smooth reproduction. The net output of each produced commodity meets the requirements for use: (B - A) q = d The amount of each quality of land that is farmed cannot exceed the available quantity: C q ≤ t A vector is greater than or equal to another if each element of the vector is greater or equal to the corresponding element...

[embedded content]Ryan Chapman On (The History Of) Socialism I found the above video fairly reasonable. Chapman tends to depict history as a debate about ideas, with little about material developments. In other videos, he seems unreliable on the new left, post modernism, and identity politics. My Marx includes a mathematical economist. This post provides some lists. As usual, I expect my lists are quite idiosyncratic. Some items, with more investigation, I might dislike. Books: Gary...

Figure 1: Wage Curves and Rent for an Example of Extensive Rent I more-or-less have a draft research article in five posts: post 1 post 2 post 3 post 4 post 5. I suggest that the current post can replace the fourth post. It is a variant on on this post. The analysis of the choice of technique in models of extensive rent can be based on the construction of wage curves, even though the outer envelope does not represent the cost-minimizing technique. The orders of fertility and rentability...

[embedded content]Noam Chomsky Having A Discussion With An Idiot This is more about current events than usual with me. Patrick Bet David talks to quite a range of people. But he is incapable of listening, partly because he 'thinks' there are two sides, Democrats and Republicans, in the United States today. I stumbled on the above after listening to a discussion with David Pakman, in which Pakman responds at one point with something like, "Some of those words mirror some of what I said."...