Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

[embedded content]An Experiment in Game Theory Game Theory provides a formal treatment of well-specified situations in which the outcome depends on the choices of several agents who may have conflicting interests. Abstractly, a player chooses a strategy, where a strategy specifies the player's move in every situation that may arise in the game. For example, a strategy for white in chess specifies, roughly white's move for every board configuration in which it is his turn. This example is...

William Petty began classical political economy in the 17th century. Classical economics was developed through the work of the physiocrats and such writers as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. Marx was also a critic. About a century and a half ago, economists mistakenly accepted the marginal revolution. Jevons, Menger, and Walras had precursors, but they were regarded as cranks. Marx, however, posed a political problem. Some might mention Henry George here, or maybe even Silvio...

Anton Pichler, Marco Pangallo, R. Maria del Rio-Chanona, François Lafond, and J. Doyne Farmer have an article Forecasting the propagation of pandemic shocks with a dynamic input-output model. This is a non-equilibrium, simulation model applying Leontief's input-output analysis. I suppose this is applied Sraffianism. For the use of Leontief input-output models in modeling natural disasters, one could do worse than look at the work of Adam Rose. Steve Keen responds to this year's Nobel...

I have found a common misrepresentation from many, including mainstream economists, is that critics of their models do not understand them or the role of the assumptions. Those mainstream economists rely on an incoherent essay from Milton Friedman to dismiss criticism of the realism of assumptions. My favorite criticism, though, is that their conclusions do not follow from their assumptions. I like to show this by constructing numerical examples that contradict their teaching. On the...

[embedded content]Richard Wolff Interviews George DeMartino (About 15:15)George DeMartino's The Tragic Science: How Economists Cause Harm (Even as They Aspire to do Good) Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy entry on analytical Marxism. One version of Marx-Engels Collected Works at the Antonie Pannekoek Archive. Maybe I should order Ludo Cuyvers' Neo-Marxism and Post-Keynesian Economics: From Kalecki to Sraffa and Joan Robinson

Empirically, prices are fairly close to proportional to labor values. But that is neither here nor there as far as the correctness of Marx's theory of value. To see that, you have to get to the last footnote in chapter 5 of Capital. (Most "refutations" of Marx are based on ignorance of the first few pages of chapter 1.) From the foregoing investigation, the reader will see that this statement only means that the formation of capital must be possible even though the price and value of a...

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...