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Friede Gard Lecture 04 The Fantasy Production Function

Summary:
The "Cobb-Douglas Production Function" dominates Neoclassical macroeconomic models today. Decades ago, Anwar Shaikh showed that it's "excellent fit to national data" occurred because it is simply a transformation of wage and profit data under conditions of a slowly changing distribution of income, while Mankiw showed that to fit international data, the coefficient for capital had to be increased from 0.3 to at least 0.8. My insight that "labour without energy is a corpse; capital without energy is a sculpture" shows that, when energy is included, the exponent for energy has to be about ten times the value Neoclassical economists use, and the best fit to the data comes from the Leontief Production Function that is used by Post Keynesian economists.

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The "Cobb-Douglas Production Function" dominates Neoclassical macroeconomic models today. Decades ago, Anwar Shaikh showed that it's "excellent fit to national data" occurred because it is simply a transformation of wage and profit data under conditions of a slowly changing distribution of income, while Mankiw showed that to fit international data, the coefficient for capital had to be increased from 0.3 to at least 0.8.



My insight that "labour without energy is a corpse; capital without energy is a sculpture" shows that, when energy is included, the exponent for energy has to be about ten times the value Neoclassical economists use, and the best fit to the data comes from the Leontief Production Function that is used by Post Keynesian economists.
Steve Keen
Steve Keen (born 28 March 1953) is an Australian-born, British-based economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticising neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. The major influences on Keen's thinking about economics include John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Hyman Minsky, Piero Sraffa, Augusto Graziani, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, and François Quesnay.

3 comments

  1. I really like these lectures. Are these ideas developed in your previous books? Much of what you stated I find overlaps with Communist inclined thinkers like Cockshott. I understand you are more Capitalist inclined. I don't care much about labels, I would just like to know in detail how we as people can make society function.

    • Thanks. They are, but in a fragmented way. These lectures were a chance to bring them together, which I intend doing comprehensively in a book I hope to finish over the next 3-4 years entited "Principle of Political Economy and Ecology".

    • @ProfSteveKeen Looking forward to it.

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