Sunday, November 16, 2008

Elsewhere

Gualra has a blog, titled "Controversias Del Capital". It seems like the kind of thing I would read if I were able to read spanish. Gualra kindly alerts me to aspects of Kaldor's thought I neglected.

I don't understand Matthew Mueller. One reason I expect professors can know more than most students is that typically students have simply not lived enough years to have been able to read as much. But this does not seem to apply to Matthew. I think this post from Matthew agrees with my previous post on the same topic. But, as I recall, I was alerted to Horwitz's controversy with Post Keynesianism by Matthew's comments on some post over at the Austrian Economics. (Here's a short recommendation of both Matthew's and my blog.)

I laugh at Paul Walker's display of ignorance, to put it kindly. Gabriel Mihalache already points out some major problems with Paul's statements. General Equilibrium does not address a research problem in which Adam Smith was interested; tâtonnement decribes a centralized - not decentralized - process for setting prices; and general results do not show the tâtonnement process converging to a stable equilibrium. In his last comment, Paul makes mistaken claims about Walras. He does not seem to realize that Walras's system is mathematically contradictory. Walras takes endowments of all goods, including individual capital goods, as givens in solving for steady-state prices.

By the way, the email discussion list for the Societies for the History of Economics (SHOE) has replaced the list for the History of Economics Societies (HES).

4 comments:

Paul Walker said...

Speaking of ignorance, I am well aware that the GE approach is not that of Smith, in fact in my posting I wrote,"This is an abstraction Smith myself would have argued was going too far. Smith knew of the importance of institutions to the proper functioning of the market economy."

Also I noted in a reply to Gabriel's, useful, comments that Walras's use of the tatonnement process was with regard to stability not existence.

Robert Vienneau said...

Paul fails to note that Walras did not have a valid argument for existence of an equilibrium, even in theory. Counting equations is hardly adequate.

And the distinction between existence and stability was not clear for Walras: "What must we do in order to prove that the theoretical solution is identically the solution worked out by the market? Our task is very simple: we need only show that the upward and downward movements of prices solve the system of equations of offer and demand by a process of tâtonnement."

Paul Walker said...

"Paul fails to note that Walras did not have a valid argument for existence of an equilibrium, even in theory. Counting equations is hardly adequate."

I didn't note it because it wasn't relevant to what I was saying.

"And the distinction between existence and stability was not clear for Walras"

But it is clear to us and we can see that the tatonnement process is to do with stability. As Arrow and Hahn write

"Walras went further and discussed the stability of equilibrium, essentially for the first time (that is, apart from some brief discussions by Mill in the context of foreign trade) in his famous but rather clumsy theory of tatonnements (literally "gropings" or "tentative proceedings")."

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