On Thu, 16 May 1996, Chai-on Lee wrote:
> Duncan in [2205] said:
> ---------------------
> I lean, because of my interest in money and short-term
> macroeconomic stability, to current market prices for many
> applications, since those prices are what people actually see and
> the money incomes derived from them are what they actually pursue.
> (A kind of materialism, if you will.) But there are other interesting
> questions about long-term regularities of the structure of production
> which may be more clearly understood in other accounting chemes.
> (I take the work of Anou, Paul C. and Allin C., and others showing the
> structural similarity of market prices to embodied labor coefficients
> as being a clue in this direction.)
>
> Dear Duncan,
>
> Could you be more specific for the term, "current market prices for
> many applications" ? I should like to call them "market values" in
> Marx's terminology. Everyday market prices are fluctuating and so
> we use their averages as their representatives, which Marx called
> 'market values'.
>
> With high regards,
>
> Chai-on Lee
"Market values" seems to say the same thing, though there might be some
advantage in reducing the multiplicity of objects referred to as "values"
of some kind or other. What I meant was doing Marxist analysis on the
basis of observed market transactions in labor-power and commodities,
rather than going through the rather cumbersome process of re-evaluating
everything in some other accounting system (such as embodied labor
coefficients or prices of production).
Yours,
Duncan
>
>
>
>