Steve K wrote in [OPE-L:3489]:
> (a) introducing technical change introduces lots of other complications. For
> a start, if I have technical change, then I also have to have an expanding
> population, otherwise in the limit my model will predict declining
> employment.
You have to have a *reason* for having an expanding population other than
the desire to not let the model predict declining employment. I.e. if you
are going to predict a population that expands with accumulation (and
thereby make the size of the population endogenous), you have to specify
reasons for *why* population would grow alongside the growth of
accumulation.
Since you have not stated otherwise, I assume above that you are referring
to the size of the population in an *absolute* sense, rather than the size
of the working population.
> (b) With technical change but without finance, you must have a "real",
> commodity-money perspective on finance. This is how Marx began Capital
> I--everything is a commodity. It can work as a starting point, but only if
> you're cogniscant of the need to introduce non-commodities later on. That
> doesn't necessarily happen: people can continue to try to make a
> commodity-money perspective (developed without a finance sector) fit a
> non-commodity-money situation (when a finance sector is introduced).
This is certainly an issue. I guess the question is at what point in the
analysis do you introduce the possibility of credit-money.
In Solidarity,
Jerry