Some Mathematics Useful In Understanding Classical Political Economy |
I consider the following to have been well established about half a century ago:
- Marginalism or so-called neoclassical economics is impossible to formulate consistently and with practical applications.
- A mathematically rigorous approach to the classical theory of value, from William Petty through David Ricardo, including Karl Marx, exists.
Mainstream economists ignore the truth of both propositions. Until they stop spouting lies and nonsense, these propositions should be re-iterated again and again. (On the other hand, I appreciate the work involved in compiling National Income and Products Accounts.)
I find a difficulty in publishing re-iterations of these propositions. I expect editors and reviewers of, say, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, or the Quarterly Journal of Economics would simply not publish papers stating either proposition. You can publish articles in, say, the Review of Political Economy which re-state these propositions, but any such article must contain something novel. For my purposes, I seem to stumbled upon a research program that includes:
- Exploring what still holds when prices of production are defined with persisting non-uniform rates of profits.
- Exploring and visualizing the effects of perturbing parameters in models of prices of production.
- Refuting those who claim to have some other analysis of the choice of technique in which, say, reswitching examples are supposedly mistaken.
Others have other focii for their research. For example, historians of political economy might be interested in the publication of critical editions of Marx-Engels Collected Works (MEGA) or of Piero Sraffa's archives. Over the last couple of decades, some have worked on exploring problems in joint production and some limitations of the long period method, such as non-reproducible, exhaustible natural resources (as seen, for example, in the corn-guano model). Many other issues have been explored.
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