In response to Paul C. on simultaneous valuation.
What I object to is "defining" values as v = L(I-A)**-1. It may be a handy
empirical proximation and be more or less useful than other equations used
to *measure* relationships. But no theoretical conclusions relevant to
Marx's value theory can be drawn from it, or from any measures obtained
therefrom, I submit.
I have no preferred method of estimating value/price relationships, know
nothing about the goodness of fit. Alan Freeman has told me that the TSS
interpretation of values yields similar results to the standard one.
Paul, you yourself back in May showed that the standard equation (no pun
on Sraffa intended) gave a marginally better goodness-of-fit to market
prices than the TSS equation.
But as I said then, nothing in Marx's theory implies that values of
individual commodities are good predictors of market prices. Nor are
production prices necessarily supposed to be good predictors of market
prices--that the latter fluctuate around the former does *not* imply
a close fit. What is crucial to marx's theory is the conservation of
TOTAL value and surplus-value in exchange, i.e., the equality of total
price and profit with total value and surplus-value. And we went back
and forth on this one several times last fall on ope-l.
Andrew Kliman