Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

Figure 1: A Pattern Diagram This post illustrates the numeric example used here. The example is of an economy in which two commodities, iron and corn, are produced by workers from inputs of iron and corn. Two processes are available for each industry, leading to a choice among four techniques. I analyze stationary states. I look at prices of production, with a bushel corn as numeraire and wages paid out of the surplus at the end of the year. Prices of production are defined so as to allow...

I have a working paper. Abstract: This article extends to unequal rates of profits a derivation of prices of production from a linear program. A partition of the price-wage space is illustrated in an example with two produced commodities. The variation in the solution of the LP with perturbations of relative markups is illustrated. This analysis provides an intuitive explanation of how the reswitching of techniques and of how capital reversing can emerge in non-competitive markets.

I first became aware of David Graeber as a poster on Usenet back in the 1990s. Many people who have succeeded in this world have no interest in conducting honest discussions. I found some places where one could have cheerful talk, including with harsh disagreement. And I found other places not so much. I probably fit in with the latter. Sometime in November 1998, a thread arose, "A Donaldism for David Friedman". David Friedman is Milton's son and also promotes plutocracy under the guise...

1.0 Introduction Piero Sraffa wrote down his 'first equations' in 1927, for an economy without a surplus. D3/12/5 starts with these equations for an economy with three produced commodities. I always thought that they did not make dimensional sense, but Garegnani (2005) argues otherwise. This post details Garegnani's argument, albeit with my own notation. There are arguments about how and why Sraffa started on his research project I do not address here. The question is how did he relate...

Paul Graham jokingly asks, "What phrase signals that the person using it doesn't understand your field?" Stephen Gordon and Alex Tabarrok both respond with "Neoclassical economics". Jamie Morgan (ed.) (2016) What is Neoclassical Economics? Debating the Origins, Meaning, and Significance, New York: Routledge. R. Robert Russell and Maurice Wilkinson (1979). Microeconomics: A Synthesis of Modern and Neoclassical Theory, New York: John Wiley.

I have a new working paper. The article presents previously unpublished material from file D13/12/111 in Sraffa's archives. In particular, it reproduces an English translation of Aurelio Macchioro's review in Annali dell'Istituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a summary by Christopher Bliss of a paper that he read to the Cambridge Political Economy Club, a draft response by James Meade, a rejected paper on Marx by Vittorio Volterra and Moshe Machover, and a paper on the subsistence economy by...

"Typically 2 the integer is used for counting, whereas 2 the real number is used for measuring. But in higher mathematics there's a technical sense in which integers aren't real numbers -- we say instead that they can be identified with real numbers." -- Timothy Gowers 1.0 Introduction Numbers, in some sense, are only defined in mathematics up to isomorphisms. This post runs quickly through some math to explain what this means. I begin by assuming knowledge of the natural numbers,...

These seem to be resources for providing the student with an overview of schools of thought, fields, and the history of economics. Exploring Economics is set up by the Network for Pluralist Economics. Here is their overview of Post Keynesianism. Economics Education is a webpage "built by Sam de Muijnck and Joris Tieleman of Rethinking Economics Netherlands." Here is their page on feminist economics. Here is their page on Post Keynesian economics. This is their page on (original)...

Zach Carter's The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, amd the Life of John Maynard Keynes. James Crotty's Keynes Against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism. Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy. Stephen Marglin's to-be-published Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First-Century General Theory. I think his earlier Growth, Distribution, and Prices parallels Donald Harris' even earlier Capital Accumulation and Income...

"One must be able to say at all times - instead of points, straight lines, and planes -- tables, chairs, and beer mugs." -- David Hilbert (as quoted by Constance Reid, Hilbert, Springer-Verlag, 1970: p. 57) Consider the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... The first two terms in this sequence are 1 and 2. After this, each term is the arithmetic sum of the previous two terms. Let A be the set of elements in this series. Let s be the function mapping an element in A onto another...