A reply to Alan's ope-l 3035.
Alan: "Nope, I'd like them to start scribbling first. ... I think that is
ultimately
the only way that mutual understanding will improve."
Fair enough. I think you're right about the mutual understanding thing.
Until one confronts the problem of how to "get from here to there," I guess,
TSS seems quirky or a bag of tricks or a dogma or something. But when you
don't evade moving from one period to the next, it becomes practical and an
almost self-evident rendering of Marx's value theory. Frankly, that's why in
our 1988 paper Ted and I didn't bother with a lot of explanations and
justifications of points that have since become controversial. We were too
naïve. It was all quite obvious.
Alan: "I prefer to persuade people to face the full consequences of the
assumptions they already have. That's what I think most people are avoiding."
You're probably right. And the "most people" includes almost the whole
economics profession. The best minds in economics have devoted tremendous
intellectual power to avoiding confronting how to get from here to there even
when ostensibly doing dynamics or dealing with time. E.g., the intertemporal
equilibrium models which dump in a whole truckload of assumptions, anything
and everything needed to make sure that the future is predetermined from the
outset. Walras forbid anything should actually *happen*.
Alan: "Have you seen a dynamic system that confirms Okishio?"
Yeah, a few, sort of, but not all have monotonically increasing productivity.
In any case, I was the one who wrote them down, and you excluded me from the
competition, so I won't post them.
Alan: "I think *after* that step has been made, *then* we can discuss
assumptions in the same language. At present we're using the
same words, but we sure as hell aren't discussing the same
thing."
Agreed. What just struck me, in connection with this, is the problem your
recent posts highlight, about how sets of transition rules keep getting
mistaken for behavioral models. When one is faced with the need for
transition rules to get from here to there, for any and all sets of behavioral
assumptions, the difference isn't hard to understand.
Alan: "My gut feeling is that the conjecture doesn't depend on the
determination of value by labor-time. I'm also pretty sure
that for all the cases discussed so far on OPE, it holds
independent of the way prices are determined."
We'll see. Let me know when I'm allowed back in the sandbox.
Andrew Kliman