Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

I want to write an inadequate appreciation of Saul Kripke, a great analytical philosopher. The Guardian has an obituary. I start from an example of a pratical use of his work. Chin and Older (2011) use modal logic to specify and reason about the security properties of (computer) systems. One wants to be able to assert who (or what) has access to certain data and who can grant access. Certain states of a system should never arrive. A Kripke structure, as presented in Chin and Older...

Apparently, Lincoln responded to this congratulations from the International Workingmen's Association: Sir, We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant warcry of your re-election is, Death to Slavery. From the commencement of the Titanic-American strife the working men of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of...

Here is Jean Jacques Rousseau: "...whether those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and if strength of body or of mind, wisdom or virtue are always found in particular individuals, in proportion to their power or wealth: a question fit perhaps to be discussed by slaves in the hearing of their masters, but highly unbecoming to reasonable and free men in search of the truth." -- Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1755). Early developers of political...

This is the start of Section 5, "Strikes and combinations of workers", in the second chapter of The Poverty of Philosophy: "'Every upward movement in wages can have no other effect than a rise in the price of corn, wine, etc., that is, the effect of a dearth. For what are wages? They are the cost price of corn, etc.; they are the integrant price of everything. We may go even further: wages are the proportion of the elements composing wealth and consumed reproductively every day by the...

This post draws attention to the existence of a vast web of existing organizations that, perhaps, operate partly outside and partly inside a capitalist logic. These standards organizations define technologies vital to keeping our society running. I think I would find it interesting for some scholar interested in council communism or syndicalism to look into these. The examples I list are perhaps idiosyncratic, out-of-date, and reflect my personal history with computing. Here is a list of...

1.0 Introduction I recently stumbled across McKiernan (2017), an Austrian response to Sraffa's book. This is a weird working paper. He works through Sraffa, with apparently no knowledge of all the textbooks explaining the book. McKiernan correctly notes that Sraffa provides little context about his points. And the mathematics is not always explicit. Naturally, McKiernan makes mistakes. If he ever revisits this, I think he would want to break it up into several papers. (Fabra (1991) is the...

1.0 Introduction Over a half-century ago, economists reached a consensus. The model in which employment and real wages are explained by the intersection of a downwards-sloping labor demand function and a supply function is incoherent, not even wrong. This incoherence was demonstrated under the assumptions of perfect competition and of firms that have adjusted their plant and other capital inputs. I do not know what Greg Mankiw and Jonathan Gruber are doing, but it certainly is not...

A Bad Reproduction Of An Engraving Of Quesnay In Kuczynski And MeekIntroduction This folder consists of: A 20 Sep. 1965 letter from Marguerite Kuczynski to Piero Sraffa. Sraffa’s handwritten annotation suggests his response is not in the archives. Handwritten notes made by Sraffa. An 18 Oct. 1965 letter from Marguerite Kuczynski to Piero Sraffa. A 25 Nov. 1965 handwritten draft letter from Piero Sraffa to Marguerite Kuczynski. An 18 Dec. 1965 letter from Marguerite Kuczynski to...

INET has a collection of links in memory of Lance Taylor. Alex Thomas has a focused review of A Reflection on Sraffa’s Revolution in Economic Theory, which was edited by Ajit Sinha. John E. King has an overview in Jacobin, of Paul Sweezy's work. Ian Birchall, also in Jacobin, tells us about Daniel Guérin. I have read his Anarchism, but I am currently reading Iain McKay's Proudhon collection. Monthly Review reposts Ksenia Arapko's review of Michael Heinrich's How to Read Marx's...

This is about Shove's review of The Socialist Tradition. Apparently Gray does not take those important in the development of economic thought seriously. Since Piero Sraffa is neither the recipient nor the sender, and the topic is not his work, maybe the editors of his collected works should not include this. 8, Abbotsford Park, Edinburgh. 10. 3rd November, 1946 Dear Shove, (If the fact that we occupied adjacent seats on the occasion of one of my rare visits to the Annual Meeting of...