On Thu, 17 May 2001, you wrote: > > _________________________ > > Paul, I guess you mean reverse capital deepening and reswitching. Correct. > In anycase, > Sraffa's and the Srrafians' arguments are of logical nature and not of empirical > nature. The neoclassical argument that a rise in the rate of interest would lead > to a shift from a relatively 'capital intensive' to 'labor intensive' technology > is not derived through some sort of inductive logic, rather it is a logical > *deduction* from their basic propositions about marginal productivity etc. No > amount of supportive empirical observations can correct a flawed logical > deduction. I certainly dont want to defend neo-classical theory here. I agree with you vis a vis the neoclassicals that Sraffa's theory is logically correct. >Furthermore, my suspicion is that no empirical observations are made in > such a way that they are faithful to the Sraffian theoretical position. I have not > followed this literature because, in my opinion, this was one of the red herring > that neoclassicals threw out against the Sraffian attack. Cheers, ajit sinha I assure you that Shaik is not defending the neo-classical position. If anything he is defending a fairly conventional interpretation of Ricardo and Marx against the criticisms of Steadman. Whilst the possibility of reverse reswitching is logically correct given the assumptions about equal returns to capital in different branches, it is still a matter of interest to determine whether it actually occurs. What I was concerned with in my post was to try and give some concrete content to Nickys statement about the technological conditions being determined by price conditions. In the absence of reverse reswitching the selection of technology that one would predict from LVT and from prices of production are the same, so that a dependence of technology ( as a determinant of labour content ) on prices, does not hold as an objection to LTV. -- Paul Cockshott, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland 0141 330 3125 mobile:07946 476966 paul@cockshott.com http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/people/personal/wpc/ http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/index.html
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