Saturday, October 08, 2011

Family Resemblances

I expect many mainstream economists to blithely make many untrue statements. It is not, necessarily, because they disagree with prosaic ideas I think well-established in the literature. I suspect it is because they are just ignorant of the literature. This post offers an example of such a prosaic idea.

Works by David Ricardo (1821), Karl Marx, Wassily Leontief (1941), John Von Neumann (1945-1946), and Piero Sraffa (1960) are important components in a long-established, anti-marginalist, analytical tradition.

References

  • D. G. Champernowne (1945-1946). "A Note on J. v. Neumann's article on 'A Model of Economic Equilibrium'", Review of Economic Studies, V. 13, N. 1: pp. 10-18.
  • Heinz D. Kurz and Neri Salvadori (1995). Theory of Production: A Long-Period Analysis, Cambridge University Press.
  • Wassily Leontief (1941). The Structure of the American Economy, Harvard University Press. [I haven’t read this particular reference.]
  • Karl Marx (). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
  • David Ricardo (1821). On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Third edition. (Republished as the first volume of The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo (ed. by P. Sraffa), Cambridge University Press.)
  • Piero Sraffa (1960). Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Political Economy, Cambridge University Press.
  • John Von Neumann (1945-1946). "A Model of Economic Equilibrium", Review of Economic Studies, V. 13, N. 1: pp. 1-9.

1 comment:

Matias Vernengo said...

I think you are right that there is a lot of ignorance in the mainstream, but some of that is manufactured, since graduate programs have decided to eliminate whole areas from their curriculum. In the old generation of mainstream economists there used to be more knowledge and understanding. The capital debates and the conservative movement in the 1970s changed all that.