Robert Vienneau: Thoughts Economics

This post, unfortunately, is inspired by current events. Economists can provide guidance on disaster recovery - for example, from earthquakes and hurricanes. Economists, for a long time, have been developing input-output models of local economies and interactions between them. I think of Walter Isard as a pioneer here. Such models are of practical importance to my post topic. Regional input-output models can describe disasters with either a supply-side or demand-side approach. In a...

Dean Baker has a new book out: Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. It recounts how laws that define property, markets, and so on have been rewritten, over the last fifty years, to accomplish an upward redistribution of income. This bias for the rich contrasts with the effects of the rules of the game in the half-century golden age following World War II. This is the same theme as Robert Reich's Saving Capitalism: For the...

Figure 1: A Bifurcation Diagram I have previously illustrated a case in which real Wicksell effects are zero. I wrote this post to present an argument that that example is not a matter of round-off error confusing me. Consider the technology illustrated in Table 1. The managers of firms know of three processes of production. These processes exhibit Constant Returns to Scale. The column for the iron industry specifies the inputs needed to produce a ton of iron. Two processes are known for...

I have put up a draft paper with the post title on my SSRN site. Abstract: This note presents two numerical examples, in a model with two techniques of production, of a switch point with a real Wicksell effect of zero. The variation in the technique adopted, at the switch point, leaves employment and the value of capital per unit net output unchanged. This invariant generalizes to switch points with a real Wicksell effect of zero for steady states with a positive rate of growth.

Figure 1: A Fluke Switch Point1.0 Introduction A switch point in which the wage curves for two techniques are tangent to one another at the switch point is a fluke. Likewise, a switch point that occurs at a rate of profits of zero is a fluke. This post presents a two-commodity example with a choice between two techniques, in which the single switch point is simultaneously both types of flukes. The wage curves are tangent at the switch point, and the switch point occurs at a rate of...

Figure 1: A Blowup of a Bifurcation Diagram1.0 Introduction I have been working on an analysis of structural economic dynamics with a choice of technique. Technical progress can result in a variation in the switch points and the succession of techniques with wage curves on the outer wage frontier. I call such a variation a bifurcation, and I have identified normal forms for four generic bifurcations. This post prevents an example in which all four generic bifurcations appear. 2.0...

This post is inspired by current events "It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science. The capitalist separation of the producer from the...

Figure 1: Two Bifurcation Diagrams Horizontally Reflecting1.0 Introduction This post continues my investigation of structural economic dynamics. I am interested in how technological progress can change the analysis of the choice of technique. I have four normal forms for how switch points can appear on or disappear from the wage frontier, as a result of changes in coefficients of production. This post concentrates on what I call a reswitching bifurcation. Each bifurcation can be...

Nick Hanauer argues for some policies that postulate: Income distribution is not a matter of supply and demand or any other sort of economic natural laws. That a more egalitarian distribution of income leads to an increased demand and generalized shared prosperity. Tom Palley contrasts neoliberalism with an economic theory with an approach with another "theory of income distribution and its theory of aggregate employment determination". Elizabeth Bruenig contrasts liberalism with the the...