Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

[embedded content]First Lecture For MIT Microeconomics I associate Jonathan Gruber with Obamacare. I think the Affordable Care Act is totally insufficient and a great advance. If politicians hire you to model the effects of some policy change, might you want to use, more or less, the most widely accepted techniques? I am also appreciative that I can watch this. When you are teaching, should you present claims in the most romantic way possible? "That is why I can teach you the entire...

This is C/294 in the Sraffa archives. Rudiger Soltwedel had his own letterhead. D 66 Saarbrucken 3, 28. Febr. 1968 Waldhausweg 7 Evangelisches Studentenheim Professor Piero Sraffa Trinity College Cambridge Dear Sir, I am student of economics at the University of Saarbrucken and I just began my finals work for my diploma. The topic of this study that Prof. E. Schmen formulated is your essay and its title is exactly that of your book: ‘Sraffa’s production of commodities by means...

This letter is an item removed from printed books in Sraffa's library. It is labeled Sraffa I/38 in the archives where I stumbled into it. 15th Oct, 75 Centre for Economic Studies, Nehru University, New Delhi 57 Dear Piero Sraffa, How are you? A lot of things have happened since my return in July to Delhi. Personally, my health was not too good for some time but has now stabilised somewhat. I had considerable teaching load this term and have had to devote a lot of time to...

Figure 1: Wage Curves and Rent for an Example of Intensive Rent The analysis of the choice of technique has above always been 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 an eligible technique are uniquely determined by the given rate of profits. If the rate of profits is in a range where such prices are non-negative for at least one technique, one of the techniques is uniquely...

Figure 1: Wage Curves and Rent for an Example of Extensive Rent 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 are emphasized here. The order of fertility is the order in which different qualities of land are introduced into production as requirements for use expand. The order of rentability specifies...

Figure 1: A Wage Frontier With A Fluke Switch Point A fluke example with fixed capital illustrates the emergence of the reswitching of techniques. Table 1 presents coefficients of production in a perturbation of an example from Schefold (1980). With the first process, workers, under the direction of mangers of firms, manufacture new machines. The remaining two processes are used to produce corn. The last process requires an input of an old machine, which is jointly produced with corn by the...

Figure 1: A Wage Frontier With Two Fluke Switch Points This post presents an example with circulating capital alone. Table 1 presents the technology for an economy in which two commodities, iron and corn, are produced. One process is known for producing iron, and two are known for producing corn. Each process is specified by coefficients of production, that is, the required inputs per unit output. The Alpha technique consists of the iron-producing process and the first corn-producing...

I did not always think that mainstream economists are mostly socialized to be unlettered knaves, deficient in mathematics and logic. It took decades of empirical evidence. These links are mostly to tedious and petty stuff, more for my own archiving. Lots of weird stuff comes from non-economists. Sometimes you will find a poster not necessarily defending me, but trying to get some other poster to say something substantial. Some, like Tim Lambert, do not even seem to care about economics....

The Babbitt family started in America with Edward Bobet, who died in 1675. We have now come to that time of terror and disaster to the settlers the uprising of the Indians, known as King Phillip's War. It can easily be imagined how many anxious hours were passed by Edward and Sarah Bobet, so far removed from the garrison stockade, with their large family of children. Judging by the quantities of Indian relics found on his home farm it would seem that it was a peculiarly favorite haunt of...

I do not know if I will keep on, but I thought I might present a series of posts expanding on this one. By the way, I should have said there that the maximum rate of profits is the reciprocal of the organic composition of capital in Sraffa's standard system, not the actual system. Sraffa's model is descriptive, based on objective data that can be observed for one production period. This data, at least through the first three chapters of The Production of Commodities by Means of...