Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

I take it for granted that marginalism became accepted partly because Marx had used the best in classical political economy in his account of why socialism would and should transcend capitalism. This post presents some who have argued for or asserted the same. I start by summarizing an argument from Antonia Campus. Campus argues that the marginalists in the 1870s did not have an accepted theory of production, cost, and price. Only in the 1890s did the marginal productivity theory of...

Figure 1: The Demand for Labor1.0 Introduction Wages and employment are not determined in competitive markets by the interaction of well-behaved supply and demand curves, as portrayed in much introductory economics. At least, no reason exists to thinks so. Every once in a while I like to recall that this is an implication of the Cambridge Capital Controversy. 2.0 Technology Consider a very simple competitive capitalist economy in which corn and iron are produced from inputs of labor,...

A 2019 profile of Stephen Marglin in the Harvard Crimson. William Morris, the author of News from Nowhere, wrote the Manifesto of the Socialist League. David O'Connell explains, in Jacobin, that Catholic orthodoxy is quite radical on the economy. Jack London's How I became a socialist.

Figure 1: A Parameter Space1.0 Introduction This is a re-creation and elaboration of a previous post. The analysis of the choice of technique, in models of circulating and fixed capital, can be based on the construction of a wage-rate of profits frontier. Given a technology in which requirements for use can be satisfied, prices of production for a feasible technique, including the wage, are uniquely determined by the given rate of profits. If the rate of profits is in a range where such...

I have been using fluke switch points to partition parameter spaces into regions. In each region, the analysis of the choice of technique does not qualitatively vary. Fluke switch points have been discussed in the literature on the analysis of the choice of technique. Mostly, these mentions dismissal fluke cases, on the correct grounds that they only occur at an accidental point in the parameter space. Here is a statement from one contribution to the famous QJE symposium: "Cases with...

Figure 1: A Parameter Space1.0 Introduction I have been reconstructing some of my examples. The first example in this post is from here. I am thinking of writing a draft article, as mentioned here. While I am at it, I thought I would also work through the examples in Garegnani (1966) and Bruno, Burmeister & Sheshinski (1966), both from the symposium in the Quarterly Journal of Economics of that year. 2.0 The Emergence of the Reverse Substitution of Labor This section presents an...

5.0 Fluke Cases This post is a continuation of this one. This is a numeric example of intensive rent. Here I present five fluke cases before depicting how the analysis of the choice of technique varies with the full range of relative markups in agriculture. 5.1 Switch Point at Maximum Scale Factor for Epsilon In the first fluke case, the wage curves for Alpha and Delta intersect at the maximum scale factor for the rate of profits for Delta (Figure 7). Figure 8 displays the graphs of the...

Figure 1: Variation of the Technique with the Markup in Agriculture1.0 Introduction This post is the start of a recreation of a previous post, with a requirement that relative markups lie on a simplex. These two posts are intended to explain Figure 1, above, which presents a summary of the results of the analysis of the choice of technique, given any level of the relative markup in agriculture, as compared with the relative markups in the non-agricultural industries. My presentation is...

Ramon Llul was a medieval scholar who invented social choice theory (specifically, the Borda count), as seen in a manuscript discovered in 2001(?). (Other discoveries.) A review of Steve Paxton's Unlearning Marx: Why Soviet Failure was a Triumph for Marx. Maybe I want to read this. Pierangelo Garegnani's Capital Theory, the Surplus Approach, and Effective Demand.

I study economics as a hobby. My interests lie in Post Keynesianism, (Old) Institutionalism, and related paradigms. These seem to me to be approaches for understanding actually existing economies.The emphasis on this blog, however, is mainly critical of neoclassical and mainstream economics. I have been alternating numerical counter-examples with less mathematical posts. In any case, I have been documenting demonstrations of errors in mainstream economics. My chief inspiration here is the...