re 5134 > > The existing >technical conditions of production are more or less objective facts, as are >the living standards of workers, and while they do change, they tend to >change rather slowly over time, so that not much violence is done to >reality by taking them as given when explaining the profit rate and >relative prices. Hi Gary, How should we go about operationalizing and testing this hypothesis? And if Ricardo did not think this even before the development of science-based industry, why should we think so today: "alterations in the quantity of labour necessary to produce commodities are a DAILY occurence. Every improvement in machinery, in tools, in builidngs, in raising the raw material saves labour, and enables us to produce the commodity to which the improvement is applied with more facility, and consequently its value alters." (Principles, p. 36, Sraffa's ed; my emphasis). One more question: are you and Steve denying that one will get different unit values and a different profit rate if one uses Alan F's difference equations instead of Walrasian/Sraffian simultaneous ones? Yours, Rakesh
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