Re: [OPE-L] Che Guevara and the Sraffian notion of profit

From: Paul Cockshott (clyder@GN.APC.ORG)
Date: Mon May 07 2007 - 15:37:19 EDT 

Ian Wright wrote:
>> I am not convinced here, the existence of a surplus allows economic
>> growth, this sort of growth is not possible using unitary matrices,
>> so in order to track the growth of capital stocks he needs non unitary
>> matrices.
>
> Sraffa doesn't "track the growth of capital stocks". His theoretical
> tools are entirely inadequate for this task. He has a one-time
> snapshot of the production of an undistributed surplus.
>
> But I agree that to model *non-proportionate* economic growth one must
> deal with symmetry-breaking technical change, which results in
> non-unitary matrices. But this must occur in the context of a dynamic
> theory, in which there are adjustment rules, expressed in terms of
> differential or difference equations. In such approaches,
> out-of-equilibrium the price and real cost matrices are non-unitary;
> but in equilibrium they are not.
>
>
von Neumann does track growth of capital stocks in a similar model of **
proportionate **
growth using non-unitary matrices, so I infer that the same thing could
be done with
Sraffa's.

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu May 31 2007 - 00:00:08 EDT