Tag Archives: Methodology of Economics

This is C/294 in the Sraffa archives. Rudiger Soltwedel had his own letterhead. D 66 Saarbrucken 3, 28. Febr. 1968 Waldhausweg 7 Evangelisches Studentenheim Professor Piero Sraffa Trinity College Cambridge Dear Sir, I am student of economics at the University of Saarbrucken and I just began my finals work for my diploma. The topic of this study that Prof. E. Schmen formulated is your essay and its title is exactly that of your book: ‘Sraffa’s production of commodities by means...

I do not know if I will keep on, but I thought I might present a series of posts expanding on this one. By the way, I should have said there that the maximum rate of profits is the reciprocal of the organic composition of capital in Sraffa's standard system, not the actual system. Sraffa's model is descriptive, based on objective data that can be observed for one production period. This data, at least through the first three chapters of The Production of Commodities by Means of...

A number of years ago, I was in the subway station under Times Square in New York City. I must have looked lost, because this fellow came up to me and asked me where I was going. I said, "A bookstore, The Strand. I like to see what they have in their economics section. I am trying to decide if I should take the cross-town shuttle and go south from Grand Central." He said, "I am an economist myself. You can have this subway map." And he handed me a map of the tube in London. "This map...

"I know not how I may seem to the world, but as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." -- Isaac Newton (apocryphal?) For the past couple of years, I have been pursuing a research program that I seem to have stumbled upon. I am looking for fluke switch points, where these fluke switch points...

You will occasionally come upon supposed refutations of Marx's theory of value that I find just ignorant. One might talk about two divers. One comes up with a handful of sand, and the other comes up with a pearl. They have put in the same labor, but their products are of quite different exchange values. Or consider the labor that goes into making a useless product, something that cannot be sold as a commodity on a market. Obviously, labor does not create value. A refutation can only be...

I have long been convinced that many mainstream economists, however they performed under hazing, do not understand mathematics. "T. C. Koopmans, perhaps the greatest defender of the use of the mathematical tool in economics, countered the criticism of the exaggeration of mathematical symbolism by claiming that the critics have not come forward with specific complaints. The occasion was a symposium held in 1954 around a protest by David Novick. But, by an irony of fate, some twenty years...

Marx is mostly right. That is the conclusion one should draw from capital theory. But honestly understanding how we are fed, clothed, and housed under capitalism is not what academic economics is about. Ownership of property in, say, the United States results in the generation of income. This income takes the form of interest on debt, dividends, capital gains, rent, and so on. Many of those who are among the most wealthy often have returns to property ownership as their only source of...

[embedded content]Katzner, Bowles, and Resnick on UMass Amherst Shartly after about 32:30 minutes, Sam Bowles, to laughter, draws a Venn diagram on the board. This is a light talk, and Bowles is explicitly describing economics from his own experience at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Bowles places various economists in various subsets. I have varied the names a bit in my reproduction below. Bowles' Taxonomy I take the universe to be the set of all economists. Or, maybe,...

I happen to think the minimum wage in the United States should be raised. I'll go along with the consensus of $15 an hour. I also happen to know that, even under ideal conditions, wages and employment cannot be explained by supply and demand. Some economists, who I no (other) reason to disrespect, seem to think my true statement about labor economics can be discredited by attacking my motivations. So they point out how, under (incoherent) neoclassical theory, higher minimum wages can...

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...