Re: [OPE-L] standard commodity

From: ajit sinha (sinha_a99@YAHOO.COM)
Date: Fri Mar 25 2005 - 01:11:51 EST


Just a quick response.
--- Andrew Brown <A.Brown@LUBS.LEEDS.AC.UK> wrote:

> Hi Ajit,
>
> The numeraire certainly ain't money!
>
> Re, your discussion of 93 percent correlation: if
> there is a 93 percent
> correlation over a number of 'observations', then of
> course there may be
> subsets of observations with zero correlation, and
> some with negative
> correlation too.
___________________________

Have you seen Ricardo's "Principles"? If you have,
then why are you attributing such things to Ricardo?
If you are talking about LTV, then as I understand it,
"T" here stands for Theory. Therefore, my point was a
theoretical one. That is, when you say that LTV states
that "there is a positive relation between labor-time
and changes in prices", then my theoretical point that
a change in price can come about because of change in
distribution without any change in labor element
leaves your theory in deep trouble. Furthermore, for
your statement to have a theoretical pretense, you
need to first establish how labor involved in
determining the prices in the first place. If labor is
not involved in determining prices and how come it
becomes the sole or the major cause of changes in
prices? So the first thing you will have to admit is
that LTV is not a theory of value but rather just a
statement about observed relation between labor-time
and changes in prices.

Now to your empirics: let us suppose that you find a
time-series of statistical positive corelation between
the amount of direct and indirect use of petrol and
change in prices. Will you then accept a "petrol
theory of value"? In this case your argument that
labor is human and petrol is not will have no validity
since your theoretical proposition is nothing but a
statistical observation. Secondly, let us suppose that
somebody finds that the corelation between labor-time
and changes in prices is not statistically
significant. Will you be then ready to accept that
your LTV is all bull?
_________________________
>
> If you think that science is no more and no less
> than the positing of
> functional relations then we disagree on our
> respective notions of
> science.
______________________

When did I say anything like that? Why do you have to
create these straw men to argue against me. I'm not
writing a dissertation on science which is going to
establish that science is no more or no less than this
or that. Why cannot we have mature discussion? All I
have said that economic science makes functional
relations and they are predictive in nature. If you
disagree, then we can further argue. Cheers, ajit
sinha




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