Re: (OPE-L) Re: Dismal Science

From: Ian Wright (ian_paul_wright@HOTMAIL.COM)
Date: Mon Jan 05 2004 - 17:27:12 EST


I think you may both be misunderstanding the meaning of the original paper.
It relates to the Pareto distribution of incomes (sometimes called a
power-law
distribution), which is an empirical fact, but it has nothing to do with the
concept of Pareto optimality.

>Hi Phil.  I'm still not quite sure what you are trying to get
>at, but I quite agree that he (Marx) didn't 'arrive at' Pareto's
>concept of optimality.   This is not to suggest that Marx would
>necessarily reject optimization methods for _all_ subjects;
>rather, I think that he understood capitalism  as a subject
>in which optimality played no central role in that system's dynamics.

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