Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

I have written up this result here Abstract: Paul A. Samuelson extends the Ricardian theory of foreign trade to a model of small open economies in which countries can trade semi-finished capital goods on international markets, as well as trade in produced consumer goods. He argues that this extension provides an additional gain from trade, which he labels the Sraffian bonus. This article demonstrates that trade in consumer and capital goods can result in a loss for an economy, given...

Figure 1: PPFs in Portugal1.0 Introduction This post continues these two posts. I change the model here to have wages advanced, not paid out of the surplus at the end of the year. I here consider an example of a model of stationary states in which two countries can trade in produced commodities to be used for consumption. The countries face given prices on international markets for traded commodities. (They are small open economies, in the jargon.) I take the rate of profits as given in...

Figure 1: Rates Of Profits for Specialization in Consumer Goods1.0 Introduction This post is a continuation of this example. How a country specializes in foreign trade depends on distribution. And foreign trade can reduce the consumption basket to be divided among the inhabitants of a country, as compared with autarky. 2.0 Patterns of Specialization Assume that the consumption basket in both countries contains both corn and linen. In a steady state, international prices and the...

1.0 Introduction This post deals with a set of ideas that I find appealing, but contradictory. I know I do not fully understand many of them. Perhaps somebody who understands more can either agree with me that there are contradictions here or point to some way of resolving them. This post is also more about current events than is typical of my posts. 2.0 Ideological Thinking, Ideological Identification, And Party Identification Consider Philip Converse's claim that a mass majority of the...

Figure 1: Specialization In A Single Country1.0 Introduction This post considers how the firms in a small open economy will specialize, given prices on international markets and the domestic rate of profits. The example would only be interesting as part of a larger argument, which I have not yet worked out. 2.0 Technology Consider a small, open economy which has a flow-input, point-output technology for producing two consumption goods, corn and linen. Corn is manufactured from inputs of...

Hilary Putnam has long argued that facts and values, or ends and means, cannot be neatly separated. In 1981 he proposed a thought experiment, I assume not to be of contemporary political relevance: What troubled us earlier was that we did not see how to argue that the hypothetical 'perfectly rational Nazi' had irrational ends. Perhaps the problem is this: that we identified too simply the question of the rationality of the Nazi (as someone who has a world view or views) with the...

Today is the 200th birthday of Karl Marx. My favorite school of thought in economics is sometimes called Neo-Ricardianism, instead of Sraffianism. As I understand it, the label "Neo-Ricardianism" was invented in 1974, as an insult, by Bob Rowthorn. Basically, he claimed to more closely follow Marx, and claimed that the Neo-Ricardians were, like neoclassicals, bourgeois economists. Other Marxist economists at the time offered arguments along the same lines. Franklin Roosevelt III, for...

The Financial Times is having a debate about whether economics has failed. The first interchange is here, with some followups here. (I happen to have two tabs about neoliberalism open at the moment as well.) Mainstream economics is a failure in so many dimensions that its failure cannot be characterized shortly in any comprehensive way. For example, I am not going to discuss funding sources and economics role as a system justification. Even so, you might find this post long and...

I have written up my recent explorations in the theory of international trade. Abstract: This article considers a model of international trade in which the number of produced commodities does not exceed the number of countries engaged in trade. Technology is modeled such that each commodity can be produced in each country from a finite series of dated labor inputs. The existence of a positive rate of profits may lead a country to specialize differently than how it would with a zero rate...

Howard Reed argues we should rip up textbooks for mainstream economics and start over. (Some of what he says echoes an argument of mine.) I do not think Diane Coyle addresses Reed's points. Cahal Moran argues the problem is economics, not economists. Beatrice Cherrier has some frankly speculative posts on what limitations economists accepted in emphasizing tractability in developing models. Nathan Robinson does not like the word "neoliberalism", but understands there is a point to using it....