Re Allin's [OPE-L:4982]: > > 1. Price of production and technological change. <snip, JL> > Fred's specific argument against Drewk a bit scholastic. The "smoking > gun" (OK, not Fred's phrase) is a set of quotations showing that Marx > held that prices of production change _only if_ there's a change in > labour productivity somewhere in the system, or if the wage changes. > But Drewk's tables show prices of production changing period by period > even when there's no change in technology or the wage, therefore Drewk > is inconsistent with Marx. Well, suppose we change the example. > Keynes held (this is a simplification, of course) that aggregate > output changes _only if_ there's a change in autonomous expenditure. > We bump up investment (I) at some time t and let the multiplier go. > On some interpretations of the multiplier we'll find aggregate output > changing for many periods after the change in I, as GDP converges > towards the new equilibrium. Can we immediately deduce that this is > inconsistent with Keynes's concept? Surely not: it's a secondary > matter whether the shift to the new equilibrium GDP occurs in one > period (instantaneous multiplier) or takes several periods. > > Similarly, Drewk's changing prices of production converge (ceteris > paribus) to the ones found via the method of simultaneous equations. > Drewk's prices of production are analogous to the multi-period > multiplier. Change in these prices is _triggered_ by a change in > technology or the wage (and I think _only_ by such things, though I > certainly wouldn't claim to speak for Drewk), but the change is spun > out over time. So I don't see much force in the smoking gun. Aren't you forgetting about another aspect of the Kliman/McGlone interpretation of the transformation? Namely, as Fred has pointed out [see #3 in 4908], that changes in market prices are explicitly abstracted from? If there are "no market price oscillations", then the temporal adjustment process you suggest can't happen. (NB: Andrew K hasn't responded to this point made by Fred). I also am doubtful about the applicability of using the multiplier analogy re TSSI interpretations since at least one well-known TSSI advocate has explicitly written about "The Fallacy of the Multiplier" (see Mino Carchedi _Frontiers of Political Economy_, pp. 210-211). I also don't think that the multiplier interfaces too well with the conservation of value principle which seems to be accepted by TSSI advocates. In solidarity, Jerry
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