Rakesh, One more thought on the matters we've been debating. You're insistent upon "realism". That's reasonable in itself, but I'd point out that your commitment to realism is selective. You totally reject simple reproduction as too unrealistic to bother with, yet you're willing to accept a perfectly equalized rate of profit, at least for the sake of argument. You may say, "But the equalized rate of profit is the terrain of the argument between Ricardo and Malthus -- Marx had to accept it, in order to intervene effectively." I respond: One always has a choice between (a) accepting one's opponents' chosen terrain for the sake of argument, and making the best of it, or (b) stating a case for the principled rejection of one's opponents' terrain of argument. It's my impression that some real capitalist economies over some (relatively brief) historical periods may have more or less approximated simple reproduction; on the other hand, I don't believe that _any_ real capitalist economies over any historical period have closely approximated an equalized rate of profit. The data we have show that profit rates have a fairly wide, and fairly constant, dispersion (though at different times, different industries have occupied the "low" and "high" slots in the distribution). My inclination is to minimize the "transformation problem" along the lines proposed by Farjoun and Machover in their "Laws of Chaos" (Verso, 1983), rather than trying (for the nth time, and quite hopelessly) to reverse the historic judgment enacted upon the transformation (on the maintained hypothesis of an equalized rate of profit) by the economics profession since Bortkiewicz. Allin.
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