Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

Or, rather, I classify economists into two kinds on each of three dimensions (Table 1). Table 1: Classifications For Economists Emphasis on social reproductionEmphasis on allocating scarce resourcesMoney non-neutralMoney as a veilEconomic issues arise under competitive model, with all agents in possession of all information actually existingEconomic issues to be explained as a result of deviation from an ideal, competitive model I have written about the first dimension before. Classical...

My article with the post title is now available at the Review of Behavioral Economics. The abstract follows: Abstract: The choice of technique can be analyzed, in a circulating-capital model of prices of production, by constructing the wage frontier. Switch points arise when more than one technique is cost-minimizing for a specified rate of profits. This article defines four normal forms for variations in the number and sequence of switch points with a perturbation of, for example, a...

Maeve Cohen, the director of Rethinking Economics, notes the absurdism of undergraduate economics teaching, even after the Global Financial Crisis. In this one page article in Nature, she calls for greater pluralism in teaching. (This has led to the usual whining and silliness in the usual places.) The American Economic Association has a moderated discussion board. I suspect much of the discussion will be too focused on narrow questions for interest by non-economists. Thomas Piketty,...

I present four claims about Marx's Capital. I strive for topics more general than, for example, squabbles about the transformation problem. I suggest that some of these claims present a useful focus for reading Marx's book, even if part of your focus is arguing why the claim is wrong. If this were more than a blog post, I would need to cite various Marxists and scholars that inspired me. Thesis I: Capital is organized around a model of a pure, two-class capitalist economy. I think the...

1.0 Introduction This post presents a model of a steady state with a constant rate of growth in which: Total wages and total profits grow at same rate. Neutral technical change increases the productivity of labor in all industries. The wage per hour increases with productivity. Each worker continues to consume the same quantity of produced commodities. But each worker takes advantage of increased productivity to work less hours per year. In these times, when concerns about global warning...

Despite the label at the bottom of this post, this is not really a profile of Amin. I happen to have started reading Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx's Law of Value (Monthly Review Press, 2018) last month. Here are a couple of quotations: "Vulgar economics is obsessed with the false concept of 'true prices,' whether for ordinary commodities, for labor, for money, for time, or for natural resources. There are no 'true prices' to be 'revealed' by the genius of the...

Apparently, a character in a current movie, Crazy Rich Asians is an economist. Dan Kopf considers whether she is a good economist. In a couple of recent tweets, Paul Krugman reacts: "Actually, I can fill this gap. "There was a movie titled The Internecine Project ... with James Coburn as a chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers who gets a bunch of people to kill each other to hide his evil past. Sounds good to me, but the movie was terrible." -- Paul Krugman, 9 August 2018 I...

1.0 Introduction In explaining the policy implications of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, Hayek argued that the central bank should try to keep the money rate of interest rate equal to the natural rate. Sraffa famously criticized Hayek by describing a model with multiple interest rates, not necessarily all equal. In reply, Hayek asserted that all the interest rates in Sraffa's example would be equilibrium rates. Sraffa had a rejoinder: "The only meaning (if it be a meaning) I can...

1.0 Introduction This is some well-established mathematics. I do not know of any use in economics. 2.0 The Field of Real Numbers I start by taking real numbers R, with binary operations for addition and multiplication, as known. 3.0 A Ring of Polynomials Consider polynomials with coefficients taken from the reals as a formal object: R[X] = { anXn + ... + a1X + a0 | n ≥ 0, coefficients from the reals. } The symbol X is known as an indeterminate. One does not consider it here as a...

A Switch-Point Perturbation Diagram I have a new working paper at SSRN. Abstract: This article presents an analysis based on a comparison of stationary states. With technology and relative markups among industries taken as exogenous, the long-period trade-off between wages and rates of profits is determined. A long-period change in relative markups among industries can create a switch point exhibiting capital-reversing. Around such a switch point, a higher wage is associated with firms...