Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

I feel each of these three needs more than I am able to say. I find intriguing radicals attacking communist parties from the left, as Negri and others (Autonomia) did in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. I draw on those who have all sorts of arguments with Solow. I find him witty. Thirwall I associate with Nicholas Kaldor and development economics. Antonio Negri (1933 - 2023). Repost of 2015 interview from Democracy Now. Libcom page of works related to Negri. Robert Solow (1924 - 2023): MIT...

I claim that what mainstream economists teach about what Keynes wrote is often false and nonsenical. Unfortunately, this is quite impressionistic in that I do not give examples of these misrepresentations. I am writing here only about the General Theory. I suppose some mainstream economists might respond that they do not teach about Keynes at all. Some say Keynes work was about policy, not theory. Keynes specifically says otherwise in the first sentences of the preface to his major work:...

Socialist and coomunist parties have formed various internationals over the course of centuries. I consider a declaration of the Socialist International, adopted at its First Congress held in Frankfort-on-Main on 30 June-3 July 1951 an authoritative statement of "The Aims and Tasks of Democratic Socialism". This declaration was re-affirmed in 1962. The declaration starts as follows: 1. From the nineteenth century onwards, capitalism has developed immense productive forces. It has done so...

I read Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time years ago. I find its thesis on the first passage of the first chapter: "Nineteenth-century civilization rested on four institutions. The first was the balance-of-power system which for a century prevented the occurrence of any long and devastating war between the Great Powers. The second was the international gold standard which symbolized a unique organization of world economy. The third was...

We live, dead to the land beneath us, Ten steps away no one hears our speeches. But where there’s so much as half a conversation The Kremlin's mountaineer will get his mention. His fingers are fat as grubs, And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his mouth. His cockroache whiskers leer And his boot tops gleam. Around him a rabble of ring-necked leaders - Fawning half men for him to play with. They whinny, purr or whine. As he prates and points a finger. One by one...

Girardi, Mamunuru, Halliday, and Bowles investigate, does studying economics make you selfish? In contrast to earlier research, they conclude no. Angus Deaton, in his book Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality apparently says, "A reader might be forgiven for thinking we are scoundrels concerned only with our own financial gain." Apparently, the Rochdale Principles were set out in 1844 in Rochdale, England, as principles for running cooperatives....

My article with the post title is now available at the Bulletin of Political Economy (Volume 16, issue 2, pp. 133-146). The abstract follows: Abstract: This article presents an example of the reswitching of the order of fertility and of the order of rentability. Whether or not these orders differ from one another varies with distribution for certain parameter ranges in the example. This analysis emphasizes that more rent per acre is not necessarily associated with more fertile land and...

These posts demonstrate, in a model of fixed capital, that the cost-minimizing choice of the economic life of a machine need not conform to traditional Austrian and marginalist theory. The cost-minimizing choice of technique around a switch point might associate a shorter economic life of a machine with an increased capital intensity. This counter-intuitive variation of the economic life of a machine is independent of capital reversing and the re-switching of techniques, both of which are...

[embedded content]If you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you are sitting Suppose one wants to discuss capitalism versus socialism or some smaller matter. One might think the discipline of political economy, now known as economics would be helpful. But it is not. What is taught in most universities in the United States was shown to be nonsense more than half a century ago. I find it hard to account for this except on the grounds of political ideology. I realize...

Figure 1: Convergence of Newton Method This post steps through an algorithm for finding a fluke switch point. I used a different example when I tried to explain this before. Today, I use an example building on my draft ROPE Article. Consider Figure 3 in this post, repeated below as Figure 2. Let s1 = s2 = 1. I want to find s3, the markup in the corn industry, such that the wage curves for Gamma, Delta, Eta, and Theta intersect at a single switch point. One wants to find a function one of...