[OPE] Bhaskar as Marx's method?

Just for the sake of clarification, I am not a Marxist myself; I reject all
eponymous theories, doctrines and ideologies. Probably "historical
materialism", a term used by Engels since 1892, is a better label, although
Marx never used that term himself.

Some neo-Ricardians conceptualise the equilibrium production price as the
price of an output or commodity which it would have, if (1) supply and
demand were equal, and if (2) the product-price level meant that the average
rate of profit on production capital is reached. But this price is a purely
theoretical price level, and one of the two conditions might exist, but not
the other.

The argument then is, that the theoretical price level is an "attractor" for
the observed distribution of prices, so that a homoskedastic distribution
obtains along the curve of the theoretical price.

The trouble though is that the theoretical price level does not exist in
reality, so how then can it be an "attractor" at all? What causal force can
it have?

The reply to that is that if we compute a production price in said manner,
then we can prove that this price can predict the observable price
distribution, since the majority of observations will be close to the
computed price-level; the probability that such a result would be due to
chance is very small.

But the next question is - even if we succeed in this exercise, which is
technically rather problematic to realize - why is the computed production
price-level able to predict the actual price distribution?

Jurriaan

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Received on Mon Feb 7 18:23:31 2011