Welcome

I study economics as a hobby. My interests lie in Post Keynesianism, (Old) Institutionalism, and related paradigms. These seem to me to be approaches for understanding actually existing economies.

The emphasis on this blog, however, is mainly critical of neoclassical and mainstream economics. I have been alternating numerical counter-examples with less mathematical posts. In any case, I have been documenting demonstrations of errors in mainstream economics. My chief inspiration here is the Cambridge-Italian economist Piero Sraffa.

In general, this blog is abstract, and I think I steer clear of commenting on practical politics of the day.

I've also started posting recipes for my own purposes. When I just follow a recipe in a cookbook, I'll only post a reminder that I like the recipe.

Comments Policy: I'm quite lax on enforcing any comments policy. I prefer those who post as anonymous (that is, without logging in) to sign their posts at least with a pseudonym. This will make conversations easier to conduct.

A Robinson Crusoe Story

1.0 Introduction

I wrote this decades ago.

Here is a simple parable. Consider an island with a particularly simple society with two people, Robinson and Friday. Robinson and Friday live on one good, call it corn. At the start of our story, Robinson and Friday have just finished a feast. Both Robinson and Friday have each eaten food baked out of 50 bushels of corn. Also, Robinson has 50 bushels corn remaining. Friday, perhaps because he's newly arrived, has none.

2.0 The Initial Deal

Both Robinson and Friday can see that they must continue to eat in the future. They understand that their continual survival could be achieved by planting the remaining corn, saving 50 bushels corn in next year's harvest, and living off of the remainder. (In this story, Robinson and Friday are each able to go a year between meals.)

So Friday says to Robinson, "Why don't you share your seed corn with me. We'll each plant 25 bushels, and tend it half our time throughout the year. If your island is like my tribe's, that will allow us to harvest three bushels of corn for every bushel we plant. So at the end of the year, each of us will have 75 bushels. We can each eat 50 bushels and use the remaining 25 bushels for seed in the next year."

Robinson says, "Why should I give you anything? I happen to believe in property rights."

Friday says, "You don't want to see me starve, do you? What do you propose I do?"

Robinson says, "I'll tell you what. Why don't we come to the following voluntary agreement. You take the 50 bushels of corn, plant it, and tend it throughout the year. After harvesting, I'll take the 150 bushels we'll get and pay you 50 bushels for your helpful work."

Friday says, "Why should I agree to that? I do all the work, and you loaf around all year in a tropical paradise."

Robinson says, "Well, it's my seed corn."

Friday says, "Oh, all right. It's a deal."

3.0 The Story Continues

At the end of the year, Friday consumes his wages of 50 bushels. Robinson consumes his profits of 50 bushels. They are in the same situation as they were originally. They strike the same deal again and continue year after year.

4.0 Friday Reads A Book

It seems Robinson has brought the captain's library off the shipwreck with him. One day Friday happens to notice this library. He says to Robinson, "What are all these books?"

Robinson says, "I don't know. Being a practical person of the middle order of society, I never bothered to read them."

Friday says, "Well, can I have that big tome by that fellow Marx."

Robinson says, "Unlike the corn, it's of no use to me. You can have it."

Friday takes away the book and tries to read Marx. He finds it quite head-scratching in places, particularly the Hegel. That part seems so deep as to be incomprehensible. But he does get some glimmers from it.

5.0 A Debate

One day at the end of three years of work, Friday confronts Robinson and tells him, "You're exploiting me. I only get a third of the produce. This year I should get 26/27th of it. And if we continue on in this way, I should get all of it eventually."

Robinson can't make anything out of this. He says, "But I provide the seed corn. Labor and seed corn are measured in different units. How can you make a fair claim on any portion of the output but what we have agreed to?"

Friday says, "It will take me a little while to explain." Robinson says, "Unless some pirates show up, we have time. Go on."

Friday says, "Each year we harvest 150 bushels corn using 1 year of labor and 50 bushels seed. We can see that any proportion of the harvest was due to the corresponding proportions of the labor and the seed corn. Here's some examples." And Friday draws the following table in the sand:

Table 1: Inputs and Outputs

Proportion	Seed Corn	Labor	Harvest
1	50 Bushels	1 Year	150 bushels
2/3	33 1/3 Bushels	2/3 Year	100 bushels
1/3	16 2/3 Bushels	1/3 Year	50 bushels
2/9	11 1/9 Bushels	2/9 Year	33 1/3 bushels
1/9	5 5/9 Bushels	1/9 Year	16 2/3 bushels

Robinson says, "That seems fairly obvious. I don't see where you are going with this." Friday says, "We can use these numbers to break down my work in each year to produce the output in the following years:"

Table 2: Reduction of Gross Output to Labor Inputs

Year	Work Torward Year 3 Harvest	Work Torward Year 2 Harvest	Work Torward Year 1 Harvest
1	5 5/9 Bushels seed & 1/9 year's labor produce 16 2/3 Bushels	11 1/9 Bushels seed & 2/9 year's labor produce 33 1/3 Bushels	33 1/3 Bushels seed & 2/3 year's labor produce 100 Bushels
2	16 2/3 Bushels seed & 1/3 year's labor produce 50 Bushels	33 1/3 Bushels seed & 2/3 year's labor produce 100 Bushels
3	50 Bushels seed & 1 year's labor produce 150 Bushels

Robinson says, "I guess that's fairly clever. If I add horizontally, I see that you have allocated each year's seed, labor, and output to your columns. That's good. But if I add the first column vertically, all I see is that our 150 bushels corn is the result of 1 4/9 year's of your work and 5 5/9 bushels of my initial seed corn. What's your point?"

Friday says, "Wasn't that seed corn the result of your work before I showed up?"

Robinson says, "Well, yes. I worked hard for it. And I was even generous enough to feed you at first."

Friday says, "That may be. But can't we say that the 150 bushels we have now embodies the sum of 1 + 1/3 + 1/9 + 1/27 and so on year's labor? And therefore that, the total labor embodied in this third year's harvest is 3/2 year's of effort?"

"I don't know."

"It's just arithmetic. My contribution to this year's harvest, as you saw, is 1 4/9 years of work. The 5 5/9 bushels you originally contributed represents the remaining 1/18 years needed to produce the harvest. Since [ 1 4/9 ]/[ 1/18 ] is 26, I should get 26 bushels for every one of yours in the harvest."

Robinson says, "Um..."

"In other words, I, Friday, should get 26/27ths of this year's produce as I said originally."

"Furthermore," Friday continues, "as long as we continue to follow your deal, your fair share should become smaller and smaller. In the limit, all of the annual harvest has been produced by me alone if you don't help out at all."

6.0 The Upshot

Robinson says, "Aren't you denying my capital is productive?"

Friday says, "We certainly need the seed corn. But how is your ownership of it productive?"

"Sure it is. You need me to make the decisions what to do with it."

"Maybe so. My labor's the horse, and your capital is the lash."

This comment seems subversive to Robinson, and he gets angry. "Look, your argument only works because of the simplicity of our island. Excess profits and losses indicate where investment can be directed most advantageously."

Friday says, "You are only arguing that the rate of profit be calculated, not that profits be paid out. That indicator is only one among several. We could have any of many different incentive schemes."

Frustrated, Robinson says, "A deal's a deal. Whatever comes out of our market transactions, that's what's fair. I refuse to do arithmetic, so I can continue to talk nonsense."

This blockheadedness on Robinson's part so angers Friday that he stages a revolution and kills Robinson. The island lives on in communism from that day forward.

7.0 Some Notes

This story is un-Marxist. According to Marx, capitalism did not arise through people rationally constructing capitalist institutions, property rights, markets, etc. Nor will it fall by convincing people of its unjustness by rational argument. Rather historical materialism describes beliefs as reflecting changes in productive forces as part of an historical process. My story is much too idealist for Marx. Also, my story does not contain money, and money is central to Marx's account of value.

The story can be made more realistic. We can add many workers and capitalists, and assume perfect competition. We can also assume continuously differentable production functions. For example, this parable is consistent with the Cobb-Douglas production function:

Q(L, X ) = 3 (50)^1/3 L^1/3 X^(2/3)

where Q is the corn harvested at the end of the year, L is the number of person-years of labor during the year, and X is the bushels of seed corn. Whatever wage comes out of the market will be equal to the value of the marginal product of labor. These assumptions and this equality of the wage and the value of the marginal product of labor are compatible with some such calculations as in the story. Unless the workers eventually get the entire product, they are exploited, as above.

While my parable is non-Marxist, the arithmetic for the concept of exploitation used in it is based on my understanding of some aspects of Marx's theory.

"...we must understand the importance which Marx attached to his distinction between 'labour' and 'labour-power': an importance essential for the context of exploitation as a key to understanding the bourgeois (or capitalist) mode of production. The role of the labour theory of value in relation to the theory of surplus value is frequently misunderstood. Often this is interpreted as embodying a Lockean 'natural right' principle, to the effect that the product of a man's labour belongs 'of right' to the labourer; whence it is held that the appropriation of part of this product by the capitalist is 'unnatural' and unethical. Hence exploitation is interpreted as a quasi-legal or ethical concept rather than a realistic economic description. If what we have said about labour and the labour process has been appreciated, it should be clear that this is an incorrect interpretation. What could be said, of course, is that the notion of labour as productive activity implicitly afforded the definition of exploitation as an appropriation of the fruits of activity by others - appropriation of those fruits by those who provided no productive activity of their own. But far from being an arbitrary or unusual definition of 'productive' and 'unproductive', this would surely meet with general aggreement as normal usage of these words. The problem for Marx was not to prove the existence of surplus value and exploitation by means of a theory of value: it was, indeed, to reconcile the existence of surplus value with the reign of market competition and of exchange of value equivalents. As he himself expressed it: 'To explain the general nature of profits, you must start from the theorem that, on an average, commodities are sold at their real values, and that profits are derived from selling them at their values ... If you cannot explain profit upon this supposition, you cannot explain it at all.'

The point of this can the better be appreciated if it is remembered that the school of writers to whom the name of the Ricardian Socialists has been given (such as Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson and John Bray), who can be said to have held a 'primitive' theory of exploitation, explained profit on capital as the product of the superior bargaining power, lack of competition and 'unequal exchanges between Capital and Labour' (this bearing analogy with Duhring's 'force theory' which was castigated by Engels). This was the kind of explanation that Marx was avoiding rather than seeking. It did not make exploitation consistent with the law of value and with market competition, but explained it by departures from, or imperfections in, the latter. To it there was an easy answer from the liberal economists and free traders: namely, 'join with us in demanding really free trade and then there can be no "unequal exchanges" and exploitation.'" -- Maurice Dobb, "Introduction" in K. Marx, A Contibution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, 1970, pp. 12-13.

Interestingly enough, the great Austrian economist Eugen Böhm-Bawerk's account of capitalism arguably does not challenge Marx's claim that the workers are exploited.

"Whoever is the owner of a capital sum is ordinarily able to derive from it a permanent net income which goes under the scientific name of interest in the broad sense of the term.

This income is distinguished by certain notable characteristics.

It arises independently of any personal act of the capitalist. It accrues to him even though he has not moved a finger in creating it, and therefore seems in a peculiar sense to arise from capital, or, to use a very old metaphor, to be begotten by it...And, finally, it flows without ever exhausting the capital from which it arises, and therefore without any necessary limit to its continuance. It is, if one may use such an expression in mundane matters, capable of everlasting life.

And so the phenomenon of interest presents, on the whole, the remarkable picture of a lifeless thing, capital, producing an everlasting and inexhaustible supply of goods. And this remarkable phenomenon appears in economic life with such perfect regularity that the very concept of capital has often been founded on it. Thus Hermann, in his Staatswirtschaftiche Untersuchungen defines capital as 'wealth which produces a constant flow of income without suffering any diminution in exchange value.'

Whence and why does the capitalist receive this endless and effortless flow of wealth? -- Eugen von Böhm Bawerk, Capital and Interest, "Volume 1: History and Critique of Interest Theories", p. 1.

Notice that attempts to change the conditions don't attack the logic of the above story. I don't see how the ability for some workers to save to become capitalists or attempts to justify some highly paid personnel as being paid for the labor of supervision threatens the logic of the story. If you want to criticize the logic, show that it's not reasonable within its own assumptions. But this cannot be done. On the other hand, those that understand, say, the John von Neumann model of growth know how to generalize the story to make it much more realistic.

Prices Of Production Before Labor Values

1.0 Introduction

This post outlines an unoriginal argument against Marx's version of the Labor Theory of Value (LTV), if that is the right name. Somehow, this post was obliquely inspired by Fabio Petri's recent working paper.

Suppose technology, net output, and the real wage are given. Then the rate of profits and prices of production are determined.

Suppose that the technology provides a choice of technique. Then the determination of the choice of technique requires an analysis at the level of prices of production. One can do labor value accounting only after the determination of the technique in use.

Given the technique and the level of operation of each process, one can then determine the labor value embodied in the output of each industry. One can then use this labor value accounting in the overall system of labor values to calculate a supposed rate of profits. In general, this rate of profits is unequal to the rate of profits in the system of prices of production.

One can also use the technique in use to identify a commodity of an average organic composition of capital, in some sense. And one can calculate the rate of profits in the system of labor values for the industry producing this average commodity. And all of Marx's other volume 3 invariants hold in the production of Sraffa's standard commodity.

But the composition of the standard commodity also varies with the technique in use and, thus, depends on the real wage and an analysis at the level of prices of production.

Supply and demand, as conceptualized in marginalist economic theory, however, remains nonsense, not even wrong.

2.0 Givens

Suppose a capitalist economy is observed at a given point in time. The net output of the economy consists of a column vector d, in which each element is measured in physical units (kilotons, bushels, etc.)

Suppose the capitalists know of the processes comprising two techniques, Alpha and Beta, for producing the given net output. Each technique is characterized by a row vector of direct labor coefficients, a₀(α) and a₀(β) and a Leontief input-output matrix, A(α) and A(β). These vectors and matricies are given in physical units.

I assume constant returns to scale and, here, that all advanced capital is circulating capital. Both techniques must be able to produce the given net output, but different intermediate commodities may be produced. The economy must hang together, in some sense. That is at least one basic commodity exists in each technique, although the which commodities are basic may vary with the technique. Also, nothing like Sraffa's 'beans', in Appendix B of his book, exists in either technique.

One could articulate these assumptions more rigorously.

3.0 Prices of Production

Prices of production, for a competitive capitalist economy, are such that the same rate of (accounting) profits is obtained in each operated process. For the Alpha technique, prices of production must satisfy the following system of equations:

p(w, α) A(α) (1 + r(w, α)) + w a₀(α) = p(w, α)

If one takes net output as the numeraire, prices of production must be such that:

p(w, α) d = 1

Prices of production and the rate of profits can be found for a non-negative wage up to a certain maximum. Prices of production and the corresponding rate of profits can be found for each technique.

4.0 Choice of Technique

The determination of prices of production for each technique, at the given wage, allows for an analysis of the choice of technique.

If Alpha is the cost-minimizing technique at the wage w, supernormal profits cannot be obtained by operating Beta. The cost of operating each process in the Beta technique at Alpha prices cannot fall below the revenue obtained. The following must hold:

p(w, α) A(β) (1 + r(w, α)) + w a₀(β) ≥ p(w, α)

If the wage is not that at a switch point, a strict inequality must hold for at least one process in Beta. I suppose that prices of commodities only produced in Beta are zero for the above display and that prices for commodities only produced under Alpha do not appear in the price vector.

For the case of circulating capital, the above is equivalent to the rate of profits for Alpha exceeding the rate of profits for Beta:

r(w, α) ≥ r(w, β)

If Beta is the cost-minimizing technique, these conditions are reversed. In any case, which technique is cost-minimizing may vary with the wage.

5.0 Labor Values

Let a₀(w) be the row vector of direct labor coefficients and A(w) be the Leontief input-output matrix of the cost-minimizing technique at the wage w.

The labor embodied in each commodity produced for the cost-minimizing technique is found from the vector of direct labor coefficients and the Leontief inverse:

v = a₀(w) (I - A(w)^-1

One could go on to perform further calculations, including with the dominant eigenvalue and corresponding eigenvector for the input-output matrix A(w). As this notation emphasizes, the data for labor value accounting depends on the wage. The data also depend on the above analysis of prices of production.

6.0 Conclusion

One could respond to this argument by asserting that typically a single technique is dominant for any distribution of income. New techiques come about by innovation, replacing existing techniques.

This rebuttal does not work for, at least, some aspects of joint production. Extensive rent or differential rent of the first kind, for example, requires an analysis to identify which type of land pays no rent and is nevertheless cultivated. It is only after such an analysis at the level of prices of production that labor values can be calculated.

Supply and demand curves have not been drawn above. Nor has anything been said about utility maximization. As Laplace told Napoleon in a different context,"I have no need of that hypothesis."

References

• Fabio Petri. 2024. What remains valid of the first chapter of Marx's Capital?, Centro Sraffa Working Paper 65.
• Paul A. Samuelson. 1989. Revisionist findings on Sraffa. Essays in Honour of Piero Sraffa (ed. by K. Bharadwaj and B. Shefold).

Why Is Reswitching Empirically Rare?

Figure 1: Variation in the Economic Life of a Machine with Technical Progress

Exploration of the effects of perturbations of model parameters in the analysis of the choice of technique has suggested an answer to this question to me. I am not sure how well-developed the argument in this post is.

The question is raised by empirical results, particularly by Han & Schefold and by Zambelli. I have previous commented on Zambelli. Heinz Kurz has recently questioned the reliability of these results. The data come from economies in which fixed capital is widely used. One can expect old plants that would not be currently reproduced to be operated and to obtain quasi-rents. Nevertheless, empirical wage curves are surprisingly close to straight lines and reswitching and other 'perverse' phenomena seem to be rare.

Bertram Schefold took his empirical results seriously. He has been exploring what happens when the coefficients of input-output system are random in some sense. Reswitching is rare, but so is switching. For most of the range of feasible income distributions, one technique is dominant. If I recall correctly, he says this contrived problem. Most innovations replace one process with another, dominant process.

I get to the same result in another way. Figure 1 is from an example with fixed capital in which all coefficients of production decrease at an exponential rate. Reswitching occurs in Region 3. But that U-shape on its side is generic, in some sense. In models of the choice of technique with a single parameter varying or with parameters varying as a function of time, one will get the same sort of shape. Reswitching only occurs for a range of time. Before or after, no reswitching, at least of the same two techniques, occurs.

Figure 2: A Part of a Parameter Space

I also have considered how to partition parameter spaces based on fluke switch points. Figure 2 illustrates two parameters in a model of extensive rent. This example is written up in one of my publications. Regions 3 and 7 and their boundaries are also generic, in some sense. Reswitching occurs within these regions. The northeast boundary, in these cases, corresponds to a fluke switch point in which two wage curves are tangent at the switch point. Reswitching disappears over these boundaries.

These boundaries intersect, to the upper left, a boundary in which a fluke switch point occurs at a rate of profits of zero. At the intersection, the two wage curves are tangent at a rate of profits of zero. The reswitching pattern, on the other hand, intersects a boundary at the lower right at the maximum rate of profits. The region in which reswitching occurs can only be in a small part of the two-dimensional projection of the parameter space. Technical progress, in this example, is a movement from the upper right to the lower left in Figure 2.

I have been constructing or perturbing examples of 'perverse' phenomena. But the kind of structures outlined above are generic in some sense. I might think a bit about what regions with triple-switching and so on look like in the diagrams with two-dimensional projections of model parameters. It seems that technical progress is a matter of one technique becoming dominant, whatever the distribution of income. This change in dominance happens in secular time or in the very long-run. It is a matter of the wage frontier moving outward. Reswitching is a transient phenomenon, occurring in the long-run. I do not know how this impacts short-run dynamics or market prices.

References

• Z. Han and B. Schefold (2006) An empirical investigation of paradoxes: reswitching and reverse capital deepening in capital theory", Cambridge Journal of Economics, V. 30: 737-765.
• Zambelli, Stefano. 2018. The aggregate production function is NOT neoclassical. Cambridge Journal of Economics 42: 383-426.

Communism Worked In Central New York Around 1500

A Beach On The East End Of Oneida Lake

The Iroquois are an example of primitive communism. This post includes lots of anachronisms, and I use current place names. I had never heard of the Haudenosaunee before, which apparently is the preferred term. I find I do not know much about my neighbors, the Oneidas. The Oneidas were one of the five nations in the Iroquois confederacy.

I am confused whether primitive capitalism is tied exclusively to hunter-gatherer societies, without a surplus product. Given the role of the three sisters, that is, corn, beans, and squash, in, say, the Oneida society, I guess they must have been an agricultural society. I gather that anthropologists have found the concept of a surplus product useful. Useful questions include who gets the surplus? What do they do with the surplus? Clark (1992) is an example of an institutionalist economist who questions whether a surplus can be conceptualized independently of its use and distribution. If primitive communism prevailed among many for much of prehistory, Marx and Engels are wrong in saying, "The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles". Apparently, in later editions of the Communist Manifesto, Engels wanted to replace 'history' with 'recorded history'.

Anyways, as I understand it, extended families of Oneidas lived collectively in longhouses. Society was relatively egalitarian and matriarchal. They had a concept of personal property, but not of private property. In particular, land could not be owned. I gather land was periodically reallocated among families, as needed. Luxemburg, in the framents of her textbook on political economy, says that land was likewise reallocated in the German mark, where a mark is a village in ancient times. I guess some villages raided others, but, as a whole, the Iroquois lived under the great law of peace. Memorial day weekend is almost the only time one can see NCAA lacrosse on national television in the USA.

Lewis Henry Morgan was a nineteenth century anthropologist. I do not know much about him, how Marx and Engels built upon his studies, or current views by anthropologists of these ideas. I was surprised to find he was from New York State and extensively used the Iroquois as an example for his claims.

What happened to these working communist societies? My answer is very selective. The Sullivan expedition was a genocidal campaign ordered by George Washington during the U.S. revolution. The question of Oneida land claims in New York are a matter of recent current events.

References

• Charles M. A. Clark. 1992. An institutionalist critique of Sraffian economics. Journal of Economic Issues 16(2): 457-468.
• Rosa Luxemburg. 2013. The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg: Volume I, Economic Writings 1, Verso.
• Brian Moore. 1985. Black Robe
• Lewis Henry Morgan. 1877. Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization

David Champernowne

No book-length biography of D. G. Champernowne exists, as far as I can see. Even his Wikipedia page is quite terse. Yet he advised and participated in important twentieth-century intellectual developments.

From Hodges biography of Alan Turing, I learned that 'Champ' was a friend of his. Champernowne did early work in programming chess-playing algorithms, along with Turing and Claude Shannon. Game-playing is one of those disappointing applications of Artifical Intelligence. What seems to work best, like ChatGPT, uses lots of processing power, while ignoring what experts in the subject matter say. Anyways, Champernowne was in on the invention of the computer.

Champernowne (1953-1954) published an appreciation and explanation of the English translation of von Neumann's article on economic 'equilibrium'. This was in the same journal issue. Von Neumann's model is classical in inspiration. No agents are maximizing utility. The composition of capital goods is found as a solution of the model. Champernowne acknowledges conversations with Kaldor and Sraffa. in writing this article.

I had not previously known about Chamernowne's (1952, 1953, 1973, 1988) work on the Pareto distribution, in the context of income distribution. I find the Pareto distribution useful in the context of extreme events.

His commentary on Joan Robinson's article kicking off the Cambridge Capital Controversy (CCC) was published in the same journal issue as Robinson's article. He explicitly notes the possibility of capital-reversing and, if I understand correctly, provides a numerical example. And he develops chain-index measure of capital to enter in an aggregate production function when no such 'perverse' case exists.

Bibliography

• D. G. Champernowne. 1945-1946. A note on J. v. Neumann's article on 'A model of economic equilibrium'. The Review of Economic Studies 13(1): 10-18.
• D. G. Champernowne. 1952. The graduation of income distribution. Econometrica 20(4): 591-615.
• D. G. Champernowne. 1953. A model of income distribution. Economic Journal 63(250): 318-351.
• D. G. Champernowne. 1953-1954. The production function and the theory of capital: a comment. The Review of Economic Studies 21(2): 112-135.
• D. G. Champernowne. 1973. The Distribution of Income between Persons.
• D. G. Champernowne and Frank A. Cowell. 1998. Economic Inequality and Income Distribution.
• Andrew Hodges. 2015. Alan Turing: The Enigma, updated edition. Princeton University Press.

Future Papers For My Research Program?

I have sometimes written retrospectives about my research program. I have been exploring the results of perturbing parameters in models of the choice of technique. This is a bit more prospective.

• Illustrations of One-Dimension Pattern Diagrams: I have a selection of these written up.
• Independence of Economic Life of Machines and Capital-Intensity: I have the analytical results I want. I am being slow to read what I need to connect results up to Austrian capital theory. I have had a much different earlier version rejected by Metroeconomica.
• Illustrations of Partitions of Parameter Spaces by Fluke Switch Points: I have had a draft paper like this rejected by the Cambridge Journal of Economics.
• Extensive rent with perturbations of markups: I have had a paper based on this rejected by the Review of Radical Political Economics. I need to reach a more definite conclusion. I probably will not go further.
• Intensive rent with perturbations of markups: This is somewhat beyond me, and I probably will not develop this further.
• Extensive rent, intensive rent, and markup pricing: This, too, is somewhat beyond me, and I do not see that I will pursue it soon.
• The Choice of Technique with Harrod-Neutral Technical Progress: This is somewhat beyond me. I probably will not develop this.

I do not see if organizing my starts will inspire me to be more productive. Since I am working on my reading for the second suggestion above, maybe I should expect to be slow at this point.