From: ajit sinha (sinha_a99@YAHOO.COM)
Date: Sun Mar 20 2005 - 01:20:19 EST
--- Andrew Brown <A.Brown@LUBS.LEEDS.AC.UK> wrote: > Hi Ajit, > > It's a funny thing but I had the impression that my > (obvious) point > about technical change was something like saying the > emperor has no > clothes (a phrase you use to describe your own point > below)! > > You write, 'But on what basis you can make that > claim? Your claim > would need an argument like what we have provided in > our paper.'. > > I reply: This is very puzzling. Is it not obvious > that, in general, two > price vectors are incommensurable if one contains > the price of a good > that the other does not? What more do I need to say > to 'prove' this > point? __________________________ Simply because what you are saying is gross exaggeration and nowhere close to the "real world" you want to champion. In no economy all the outputs of the production process are qualitatively "new goods" and different from what they were as inputs. A few new goods may come up but they are not large in numbers, and there is no problem in dealing with their pricing by treating them as non-basics. Usually quality of a good might show a good deal of change if you compare the two goods at distant points in time but from year to year they are qualitatively almost indistinguishable. I don't know where you are getting this fetish from that economies only produce machines and the machine producing factories are producing qualitatively completely new goods every production cycle. It sounds like science fiction to me. It is, of course, obvious that one cannot compare prices of a qualitatively new good with any previous prices, but this does not mean that if there are some qualitatively new goods in the system it ipso facto invalidates comparison of prices of all other goods that have remained qualitatively the same. Now I’m not going to respond blow by blow since it is getting too long and your message is getting truncated and also I can see that you are simply repeating yourself. So in a few words, as far as your point about new machines and technical change is concerned, my answer is that we can easily add machines on the input side and a few new machines and old machines on the output side as joint products. This would only complicate our equations but will not change the results. Actually I had thought that I’ll get my expected results only in joint production cases and I was pleasantly surprised when Paul got the result for even singly produced good cases. Actually getting such a result in a simple case is much stronger than getting it in a more complicated case. Now, let me make a brief comment on your rendition of the LTV. You say: “Its strange stuff, to be sure. It explains price magnitude only by the familiar mechanism of the invisible hand (a whole different story to my sack of potatoes). The point re. magnitude is that this mechanism does not mean that labour time and price lack any relationship (as do, for example, labour time and weight). That's all that is required. It makes sense of beginning with price-value(labour time) equivalence and then examining deviations from equivalence at more complex levels of theory. For it gives prices meaning, as forms of value, in any capitalist system, hence laws do apply to capitalism and we aren't left floundering, as I fear we are according to your view.” Is this what you are presenting as an alternative to Sraffa? I know you are intelligent enough to know that what you have written is pure mumbo-jumbo. But let me try to get back to some meaning step by step. You say, “The point re. magnitude is that this mechanism does not mean that labour time and price lack any relationship (as do, for example, labour time and weight). That's all that is required.” My question is: what is this relationship between labor-time and price? And particularly when, according to you, this labor-time cannot be measured? Cheers, ajit sinha __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/
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