A Fluke Case With Two Fluke Switch Points

Figure 1: Switch Points On The Axis For The Rate Of Profits And At r = -100 Percent

This is an example of a fluke case in the analysis of the choice of technique. The interest in flukes, for me, is that they show how the characteristics of markets can change. They provide insight into structural economic dynamics, as Luigi Pasinetti calls it.

I have previously shown a fluke case, with a switch point on the axis for the rate of profits with a real Wicksell effect of zero. A perturbation of the example can lead to a reswitching example. The switch point at a wage of zero (when the workers live on air) then becomes one at a positive wage. And around that switch point, a higher wage is associated with cost minimizing firms hiring more workers to produce a given net output.

In the example in this post, the switch point on the axis for the rate of profits exhibits neither a forward nor a reverse substitution of labor. The labor coefficient in the corn industry does not vary with the processes in the technique. The Alpha technique has a ghostly presence. It can only be chosen, and not even uniquely so, when the wage is zero. A perturbation of this example can lead to one of the reverse substitution of labor. The switch point on the axis for the rate of zero would also become one at a positive wage. And that switch point might be the only switch point on the frontier at a non-negative rate of profits. Around that switch point, a higher wage is associated with cost-minimizing firms hiring more workers to produce a given gross output of corn. The labor coefficient in the corn-producing process for the technique preferred at a higher wage is larger.

Table 1: Coefficients of Production for The Technology

Input	Iron	Corn Industry
		Alpha	Beta
Labor	1	0.64097922	0.64097922
Iron	9/20	0.00157618	0.01686787
Corn	2	0.48125981	0.0674715

Table 1 specifies the technology in my usual way. I assume labor is advanced, and wages are paid out of the product at the end of a production cycle. I take a unit of corn as numeraire. Prices of production are here defined with a uniform rate of profits between the industry. I found this example with numerical exploration, so there is some round-off error in the figures.

This post is another demonstration that explaining wages and employment by supply and demand, even under ideal competitive conditions, is incoherent nonsense.