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

From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Mon Mar 19 2007 - 05:31:38 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.


Why, Jurriaan Bendien, do you not find Dr Carchedi's answer very
convincing? And is that all there is to Dr Carchedi's answers to his
interesting questions? And while I appreciate the absence of venom in
your discussion of TSSI, what is the point of criticizing it on a
list in which they do not participate? How are we to avoid
distortions of their positions and work? Can you ask Dr Carchedi to
resubscribe to this list?

Rakesh


>
>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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