John Stuart Mill, Avowed Socialist

I have been reading some secondary literature on John Stuart Mill. He was explicitly against meritocracy, although that term was not available until Young's satirical novel. Here is Mill:

"If some Nero or Domitian were to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that any were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? Is it not, on the contrary, an irresistible claim upon every human being for protection against suffering?" – J. S. Mill

The above is not necessarily an argument for socialism. It is consistent with Mill's investigation of what a society organized around private property might be.

In his autobiography, Mill explicitly says that he became a socialist:

"Our [Mill and Harriet Taylor] ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists. While we repudiated with the greatest energy that tyranny of society over the individual which most Socialistic systems are supposed to involve. we yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all; when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert, on an acknowledged principle of justice; and when it will no longer either be. or be thought to be. impossible for human beings to exert themselves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not to be exclusively their own, but to be shared with the society they belong to." -- J. S. Mill

Mill is the canonical example of a classical liberal. His short book On Liberty is still read. How can he also be a socialist?

Reference

• Helen McCabe. 2021. John Stuart Mill, Socialist. McGill-Queen's University Press.
• Matthew McManus. 2024. The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism. Routledge.
• Michael Young. 1958. The Rise Of The Meritocracy: 1870-2033.. Pelican.

Rent As Joint Production

I here think about Sraffa's price equations for rent. I try to formulate them explicitly as the system of price equations in the chapter on joint production. I suppose this is a case of me setting out something that many take as obvious.

The data for Sraffa's price equations include the specification of a number of processes producing commodities. Suppose the l process is operated by a capitalist farmer. And they pay rent on the uth type of land. The price equation is:

(p₁ a_1,l + p₂ a_2,l + ... + p_n a_n,l)(1 + r) + rho_u c_u,l + w a_0,l = p_l

Above, rho_u is rent per acre, and c_u,l are the acres of land per unit output for this process. I hope the remaining symbols are obvious.

Let f_u be the purchase price of an acre of land of the uth type. The above equation can be rewritten as:

(p₁ a_1,l + p₂ a_2,l + ... + p_n a_n,l + f_u c_u,l)(1 + r) + w a_0,l = p_l + f_u c_u,l

where:

rho_u = f_u r

The above equality is equivalent to an infinite sum:

f_u = rho_u/(1 + r) + rho_u/(1 + r)² + rho_u/(1 + r)³ + ...

In an explicit formulation of a model of rent as one of joint production, no elements of the input and output matrices, as seen in the price system, are negative. The price of an acre of land is the present value of the stream of rent payments expected to be received on that land in the future.

The above works for intensive rent. One of the lands has a price of zero in the case of extensive rent. How is that expressed in the price equations? I suppose only commodities, that is, goods with positive prices, enter into the equations. Air, being free, does not appear in the price equation for some chemical process that requires nitrogen in some way, for example. But then the solution to a problem of the choice of technique is taken as given. I have a difficulty with many of the chapters in the part on joint production in Sraffa's book.

Textbooks For Marxian Political Economy

Suppose you find Marx's Capital intimidating. You could start with textbooks. I confine myself to a selection in English.

I start with Soviet textbooks. I suppose the Dictionary is not really a textbook. But Apparently, it was a standard reference work. Here are some Soviet textbooks:

• N. Buharin & E. Preobrazhensky. 1922. The ABC of Communism. The Communist Party of Great Britain.
• I. Lapidus & K. Ostrovityanov. 1929. An Outline of Political Economy: Political Economy and Soviet Economics. Martin Lawrence.
• Institute of Economics of the Academy of sciences of the USSR. 1954, 1957. Political Economy. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
• I. Frolov (ed.) 1967, 1984. Dictionary of Philosophy. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Here are some textbooks:

• Paul M. Sweezy. 1942. The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy. Dennis Dobson Ltd.
• Meghnad Desai. 1979. Marxian Economics. Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Robert Paul Wolff. 1984. Understanding Marx: A Reconstruction and Critique of Capital. Princeton University Press.
• Duncan K. Foley. 1986. Understanding Capital: Marx's Economic Theory. Harvard Univ ersity Press.
• Bob Milward. 2000. Marxian Political Economy: Theory, History, and Contemporary Relevance. Palgrave.
• David F. Ruccio. 2022. Marxian Economics: An Introduction. Polity.
• Deepankar Basu. 2023. The Logic of Capital: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory. Cambridge University Press.

I suppose I could expand the above list with reading guides, from David Harvey or Michael Heinrich, for example. The boundary between a textbook and an interpretation is unclear, where by the latter I mean books intendeded to argue with the literature. And I could also have introductory books that are definitely not textbooks, like Eagleton's Why Marx was Right. Even so, I expect this to only be a starting list.

Different authors have different takes. If you want to start with an introduction, I suggest you only pick one.

Some Literature On The Compatibility Of Exhaustible Resources With Classical Political Economy

I have been writing about natural resources that emerge unchanged from the production processes. In contrast, Bidard & Erreygers (2001, 2020) developed the corn-guano model to examine the compatibility of classical political economy with exhaustible natural resources. They argue that a royalty for an exhaustible natural resource will vary over time, in accordance with the Hotelling rule. Parrinello (2004) and Kurz & Salvadori (2011, 2015) argue that when the resource will be exhausted is not well-enough known for the Hotelling rule to apply. The price system, under their assumptions, has enough equations to determine the royalty, without prices varying over time. For Ravagnani (2008), the royalty for an exhaustible resource provides another degree of freedom and is set as a percentage of production by conventions and social norms, much like the natural wage in Ricardo and Marx. Hahnel (2017) emphasizes throughput efficiency, which is related to the rates at which the natural environment’s stock of natural resources and environmental sinks are used by human economic activity. These applications of classical political economy to environmental concerns are outside the scope of of my treatment of absolute, extensive, and intensive rent.

References

• Bidard, Christian, and Guido Erreygers. 2001. The corn-guano model. Metroeconomica, 52(3): 243-253.
• Bidard, C. and G. Erreygers. 2020. Exhaustible resources and classical theory. Oeconomia: History, Methodology, Philosophy, 10 (3): 419-446.
• Hahnel, Robin. 2017. Radical Political Economy: Sraffa versus Marx. New York: Routledge.
• Kurz, Heinz D. and Neri Salvadori. 2011. Exhaustible resources: Rents, profits, royalties and prices. In Volker Caspari (ed.), The Evolution of Economic Theory: Essays in Honour of Bertram Schefold. London: Routledge, 39-52.
• Kurz, Heinz D., and Neri Salvadori. 2015. The ‘Classical’ approach to exhaustible resources: Parrinello and the others. In Heinz D. Kurz and Neri Salvadori, Revisiting Classical Economics. Studies in Long Period Analysis, 304-316. London: Routledge.
• Parrinello, Sergio. 2004. The notion of effectual supply and the theory of normal prices with exhaustible resources. Economic Systems Research, 16(3): 311-322.
• Ravagnani, Fabio. 2008. Classical theory and exhaustible natural resources: notes on the current debate. Review of Political Economy, 20(1).

Sam Tanenhaus Wrong On Buckley On Yale Economics

I have not even yet got to the founding of National Review in this no-doubt authoritative biography. But:

"With the assistance of [Lucille Cardin] Crain and her academic consultants Bill drew up his own list of dangerous books, most of them recently published. First on the list was Paul Samuelson's Economics: An Introductory Analysis. Published in 1948, it laid out the basics of Keynesian and neoclassical theories and in the next years became the most widely used textbook in the field. Its arguments contradicted the laissez-faire ideas to which many Yale donors and alumni subscribed. And, Buckley strongly suspected, those donors and alumni might not be aware that 'the net influence of Yale economics [is] thoroughly collectivistic.'" -- Sam Tanenhaus, 2025. Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America. New York: Random House (204).

I suppose this could be a matter of judgement. I say that, as far as economics goes, Lorie Tarshis' textbook was first on the list. William F. Buckley was participating in an extra-academic intervention so successful that most economists are probably not even aware that Tarshis' textbook existed.

A Paradox For Those Who Know Mathematics

Bri the Math Guy on What to Know for Real Analysis

If you know mathematics, you will be quite willing to deny that.

Some who know me think that I am good with mathematics. Apparently, I used to say quite frequently, when trying to explain something, "It is just math."

I suspect that a lot of those exposed to some advanced mathematics will disclaim knowledge of mathematics. We all have had the experience of taking a couple of hours of reading one or two pages of math and still not being sure of our understanding. Perhaps we read with paper and pen in hand - I am quite willing to cross things out, instead of erase - and work out each step. And still, after going through an entire proof, not being sure of the point.

Even after you have learned or been exposed to quite a bit, you may find that parts of mathematics whose very existence is surprising. For me, these parts still include model theory and alegbraic geometry.

Some cannot read a book if a single equation appears in it. I know that that is so, but I find hard to grasp. Some math books will say that the only prerequisite is mathematical maturity. And I do recall one teacher suggesting that, for our first go-through, we should read a chapter of our textbook like a novel. One thing I have not come across literature on is how authors of math books decide on the scope.

Anyways, to have a hope at learning some math, you must be willing to put time in, while feeling lost. But maybe I am generalizing too much from my own experience.

As I am writing up my example with absolute, extensive, and intensive rent, I want to NOT present a general model. I'd like to say just see Kurz & Salvadori (1995). But they do not have a general model combining intensive and extensive rent, as I understand it. Nor they have a general model with markup pricing.

So instead of doing math, I am writing about math.

Reference

• Lara Alcock. 2013. How to Study as a Mathematics Major. Oxford University Press

Why Can't We All Get Along?

Little Stephen and the Disciples of Soul

I guess this is current events.

I never was of the right temperament for this idea. But many decades ago, I could be intellectually convinced by those saying that we all want the same things. We just disagree on the means. We can discuss and argue about those means, with some approach to rational arguments.

I was wrong.

In the United States today, many do not want general prosperity for all. They want hierarchy, with themselves on top. They do not want to succeed, unless some others fail. They deny the right to exist for many.

In what kind of society can we live freely with such reactionaries? Many would say the answer is liberal society. We want a minimum set of rules, and a lack of restrictions, such that everybody is free to pursue their own idea of a good life. Many of these rules are like conventions on which side of the road to drive. No ethical question arise here. But if we all agree to drive on the right, each of us can make our own plans to get from one place to another with some confidence that they will succeed.

Questions obviously exist about the content and extent of these rules. I think an extreme degree of inequality, with those towards the bottom having only the prospect of a precarious life, is incompatible with a liberal society.

But what happens when those who do not accept the existence of those who differ too much from them take advantage of the liberal norms? Karl Popper reads Plato's Republic as putting forth the paradox of tolerance:

"Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. - In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal." -- Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume 1, footnote 4 to chapter 7.

I'd rather not live in a time where this paradox was directly applicable.