Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

In Mark Twain's novels, Huckleberry Finn is just a kid in what you might think is the most despised group in society. His mother ran away, and his father, who rarely is home to look after him, is the town drunk. Huck does not go to school, dresses in rags, and often sleeps outside in some barrel down by the waterfront. But Huck is quite conscious that some hard-working adults are looked down on worse than him by respectable people. 'That's all right. Now, where you going to sleep?' 'In...

The Four Circuits of Capital Marx describes three circuits of capital in the opening chapters of Volume 2 of Capital. But when I draw a diagram, as above, a fourth circuit seems to be missing. So I have added the circuit of advanced capital. The circuit of advanced capital begins with commodities, consisting of means of production and labor power, in the hands of or under the direction of capitalists. They have purchased these commodities with monetary advances. The capitalists, at this...

Figure 1: Convergence to a Pattern of Switch Points over the Axis for the Rate of Profits1.0 Introduction This post illustrates how to find fluke switch points. As usual, I proceed by example, in this case, as taken from my paper in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics. 2.0 Technoplogy In this example of a capitalist economy, two commodities, iron and corn, are produced. One process is known for producing iron. In the iron industry, workers use inputs of iron and corn to produce an...

Ben Franklin was one the founding fathers of the United States. He participated in the constitutional convention. He was the first Postmaster General. He did experiments with electricity, when the Leyden jar was a new thing. There is a story about flying a kite in a thunderstorm. He also wrote about the wealth of nations: "Finally, there seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is...

Figure 1: A Pattern Diagram1.0 Introduction Aside, perhaps from the above visualization, nothing novel is presented in this post. It follows an example presented by Freni (1991). I know of this example from problems 7.7 and 7.29 in Kurz and Salvadori (1995). The oddities of this example can be seen in an earlier and more complicated example from D'Agata (1983). This is an example of intensive rent. When the requirements for use are large enough, capitalists will use more than one process...

[embedded content]John Eatwell On The Bomb Sraffa Planted At The Foundations Of EconomicsJames Galbraith on Dismal Economics, reviewing books by Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison, Stephen Marglin, Alessandro Roncaglia, and Robert Skidelsky. Jane Gleeson-White, in the Guardian, on accounting, unpaid care work, and the biosphere. A blog post pointing out Bob Murphy's confusions and mistakes on the implications of the Cambridge Capital Controversy for the Austrian school. Compare and...

To me, this is an easy question. SNALT, for a capitalist economy, is: L = a0 (I - A)-1y The notation is from Luigi Pasinetti's Lectures on the Theory of Production. The idea can be empirically applied with data from national income and product accounts (NIPAs), using techniques explained in, for example, Ronald Miller and Peter Blair's Input-Output Analysis

Figure 1: Wage Curves and Rent1.0 Introduction I might as well illustrate an example with extensive rent and reswitching. I find it incredible that the agents in these sorts of models understand the implications of, say, a variation of the distribution of income for their self-interests. Nevertheless, I try to note the consequences of variation in the distribution of income and perturbations of model parameters on prices of production. And I do not worry too much about disequilibria. 2.0...

"Let us take the process of circulation in a form under which it presents itself as a simple and direct exchange of commodities. This is always the case when two owners of commodities buy from each other, and on the settling day the amounts mutually owing are equal and cancel each other. The money in this case is money of account and serves to express the value of the commodities by their prices, but is not, itself, in the shape of hard cash, confronted with them. So far as regards...

Figure 1: Variation in Switch Points with Time1.0 Introduction This post continues my effort to understand how fluke cases can partition parameter spaces in models of prices of production with extensive rent. Some background for this post is here, here, and here. 2.0 Technology The technology is described by the coefficients of production in Table 1. I assume that requirements for use are such that they cannot be satisfied by cultivating only two types of land. After fully cultivating...