From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Tue Jun 01 2004 - 19:05:01 EDT
At 5:56 AM -0700 6/1/04, ajit sinha wrote: >--- Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU> wrote: >> At 3:12 AM -0700 6/1/04, ajit sinha wrote: >> >Rakesh, I have no idea what is this about. Can we >> >stick to the issues we are debating? Cheers, ajit >> >sinha >> >> Out of his debate with Malthus Ricardo was led to >> search for an >> invariable measure of value, no? Sraffa claimed to >> have devised just >> that in the standard commodity, no? So why did >> Malthus prompt Ricardo >> to search for an invariable measure of value? >> Why--or on what exact >> assumptions--can (as you put it in the Westra and >> Zuege volume) "the >> effect on the money commodity of a change in wages >> imply that even if >> the net output has been kept constant in physical >> terms a change in >> its distribution between wages and profits could >> very well change its >> size when measured in... money terms"? >> >> Rakesh >______________ >As I said, "money commodity". But this is not the >issue we are discussing here. Let's keep to the issue. >Cheers, ajit sinha Ajit, this won't do. It's not an answer to the question that I put to you. (As for your questions, check the archive:I answered them long ago; Ian seems willing to engage you, so you can press him.) What kind of commodity is the money commodity? It is explicit in the Malthus/Ricardo debate that money is a commodity (I can give you the Malthus page cites if you want them.) What is implicit is that money is like most commodities, i.e. output variation allows for the regulation of supply such that its production yields the average rate of profit over time. But money is not--for non accidental reasons--such a commodity. Ricardo recognized this (see pages that I cited) but did not understand why, given the kind of commodity that money is, any effect on the money commodity of a change in wages would not imply--as Malthus, Sraffa and you think--that even if the net output has been kept constant in physical terms a change in its distribution between wages and profits could very well change its size when measured in... money terms? A change in distribution will of course affect profitability in the money sector but it will not also imply a change in the size of the net product when measured in money terms. There is thus no need for the standard commodity as a measure of value invariable to distributional shifts. Sraffa should have negated the Malthusian problematic. You only get the "curious effects" of a change in the size of net product from distributional shifts alone if you assume that the rate of profit in the money sector has to be "set equal to" the new average rate of profit which results from distributional changes. But there's no justification to put money in the same system as most other commodities. Marx also never admitted to the need for the inputs to be transformed from values or simple prices to prices of production. Bortkiewicz mis-read the very little of Marx he seems to have read. This mis-reading has been repeated countless times. It has the force of inertia. But a mis-reading of Marx it is. The intricate construction of an invariable measure of value, money reduced to a numeraire, the transformation problem, the counting of equations and unknowns simultaneous solutions,, etc.--it's all been a waste of time. Well no really it's all been an attempt to domesticate Marx, to make him a critic of capitalist distribution as either unjust or non conducive to growth, to take us back to the limited horizons of John Stuart Mill. Yours, Rakesh
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