[OPE-L] the point of a dynamic model?

From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sun Mar 18 2007 - 06:30:23 EDT 

Thanks for your comment, Jerry. As a socialist, I am not aligned with any
particular Marxist tendency, or any particular Marxist solution of the
transformation problem. I am not really interested in the transformation
problem as such, my specific interest is only in the concept, application
and development of the "law of value" in a modern setting. Contrary to
many Marxists and economists, I see no real gnosological problem per se with
using concepts of economic value together with concepts of price. This
happens all the time in business and accounting.

The TSSI attack on equilibrium economics is twofold: it does not make sense
in its own terms, and it does not make sense of Marx. Last year Mino
Carchedi sent me a draft paper dealing with the question "if the
non-equilibrium approach is the correct one, if the economy and thus society
are neither in a state of, nor not tend towards, equilibrium, how can the
economy and thus society reproduce themselves?  How can both the
reproduction and the possibility of supersession of social reality be
explained if they are in a permanent state of non-equilibrium?". But his
answer in terms of "dialectics" I do not find very convincing.

Towards the end of his life, Marx toyed with the idea of studying the
ups and downs of the trade cycle mathematically, but Samuel Moore
convinced him that the data to do it did not exist yet. See:
The Significance of Marxian Economics for Present-Day
Economic Theory, by Wassily Leontief in The American
Economic Review, Vol. 28, No. 1, Supplement, Papers and
Proceedings of the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the American
Economic Association (Mar., 1938), pp. 1-9.

Marxists and economists talk very easily about inputs and
outputs and try to calculate Marxian categories from official
data but they forget that these inputs and outputs are themselves
calculated according to the concept of value-added.

Jurriaan

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