Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

I have long been convinced that many mainstream economists, however they performed under hazing, do not understand mathematics. "T. C. Koopmans, perhaps the greatest defender of the use of the mathematical tool in economics, countered the criticism of the exaggeration of mathematical symbolism by claiming that the critics have not come forward with specific complaints. The occasion was a symposium held in 1954 around a protest by David Novick. But, by an irony of fate, some twenty years...

I have been exploring Sraffa's correspondence after the publication of his book. Here is a letter dated June 18, 1962, from Mathur to Sraffa (D3/12/111: 298): Dear Mr. Sraffa, In Nuffield there is a senior research student Edmund Nell who is attached to the faculty of Literae Humaniores[?] and is researching into the significance of concepts in economics. He is highly interested in the type of analysis you have proposed, and has been trying to work his way through it. In Oxford there...

[embedded content]Neoclassical Political Economy You may have seen the above overly polite video. I have not done this in a while, even before the pandemic. I used to, when I visited an academic bookstore or a college library, skim through textbooks, concentrating on introductory or intermediate microeconomics. Economics is in an extraordinary state, where the textbooks are full of nonsense that has been known to be logically invalid for half a century. Here is an example. David D....

Marx is mostly right. That is the conclusion one should draw from capital theory. But honestly understanding how we are fed, clothed, and housed under capitalism is not what academic economics is about. Ownership of property in, say, the United States results in the generation of income. This income takes the form of interest on debt, dividends, capital gains, rent, and so on. Many of those who are among the most wealthy often have returns to property ownership as their only source of...

1.0 Introduction One inspiration for this post is stumbling across this abstract 2.0 Marx Start with labor coefficients and a Leontief input/output matrix, in physical terms. You can construct this from make and use tables for your country, given price indices by sectors. For any existing capitalist economy, I expect that matrix to characterize a more than viable economy. After all the capital goods used up in producing the final demand in, say, a year are reproduced, some commodities...

I have been looking at Sraffa's archives. Scott Carter was responsible for putting them online, as I understand it. Anyways, I know some contents has been published. What should I read for transcripts of letters between Robinson and Sraffa? Maybe something by Marcuzzo? Anyways, here is a 18 June 1960 letter from Robinson to Sraffa (D3/12/111: 340-341) All the work that I have been doing the last 10 years has been very much influenced by you – both our conservations in old days and by...

I have defined patterns of switch points in considering perturbations of examples of the choice of technique. For example, I have defined three-technique and four-technique patterns. An obvious extension is to consider how these patterns arise in models of joint production. A simplification is to only consider models of fixed capital without superimposed joint production. This post lays out an example in which, maybe, some parameter values can lead to a three-technique pattern. I am...

[embedded content]Katzner, Bowles, and Resnick on UMass Amherst Shartly after about 32:30 minutes, Sam Bowles, to laughter, draws a Venn diagram on the board. This is a light talk, and Bowles is explicitly describing economics from his own experience at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Bowles places various economists in various subsets. I have varied the names a bit in my reproduction below. Bowles' Taxonomy I take the universe to be the set of all economists. Or, maybe,...

Do economists have anything to say about racism in the United States? Some do. The Review of Black Political Economy, for example, exists. Other groups in the United States are often thought of as marginalized. I have written about women in economics before. As usual, I want to mention the existence of the International Association for Feminist Economics and their journal Feminist Economics. I also note the existence of Queer Economics: A Reader for those economists that might be of a...

This post lists some views on Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: A Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory. The quantity flows Sraffa takes as given are those observable in an actual economy at a given time, as with a snapshot (Roncaglia 1978). These quantity flows, on the contrary, are at the level of effectual demand (Garegnani 1990). These quantity flows are for an economy in a self-replacing state. The assumption of constant returns to scale is necessary for drawing...