is there a book with a focus exclusively on the TSSI more recent than the 2015 one in this list?
- Armstrong, Phil (2020). Can Heterodox Economics Make a Difference? Conversations with Key Thinkers Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
- Potts, Nick and Andrew Kliman (eds.) (2015). Is Marx's Theory of Profit Right? The Simultaneous-Temporalist Debate. Lanham: Lexington Books.
- Kliman, Andrew (2007). Reclaiming Marx's "Capital": A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency. Lanham: Lexington Books.
- Freeman, Alan, Andrew Kliman, and Julian Wells (eds.) (2004). The New Value Controversy and the Foundation of Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
- Freeman, Alan and Gulielmo Carchedi (eds.) (1996). Marx and Non-Equilibrium Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
I am not sure the first should be in this list. It is a collection of interviews with economists, including Kliman and Potts. The second has articles by such critics as Simon Mohun, Roberto Veneziani, and Robert Paul Wolff. The third includes articles by David Laibman and Paul Cockshott & Allin Cottrell, among many others. None have anything by Gary Mongiovi, as far as I can see. In general, I oppose the TSSI.
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I spent entirely too much time in the early 2010s reading basically every paper in the pro/anti TSSI debates, including everything from the Mohun/Veneziani section of that book, debates with Moseley, and still others, like Duncan Foley -- even Matias Vernengo got in on it in the blogosphere, as I recall.
By the end of it all, I very much came away not sure what, beyond prior commitments, could keep folks opposed to the TSSI; it appears to do all that it claims to do, and I've yet to find an issue raised by the detractor camp that hasn't been rebutted adequately. And the empirical work of the last decade plus (including books by Kliman, Roberts, Carchedi, and others) seems to bear it out well. (Hell, even as mainstream a source as Deloitte has, in its more vulnerable moments, professed confusion over what seems to be secular decline in returns on assets over the last four decades.)
Anyway, in the midst of my many deep dives, I also found an interesting paper by Marxist accountant Robert Bryer, who argued for "Marx's Accounting Solution to the Transformation Problem." Similarly to the TSSI, he had argued that the transformation problem was essentially read into Marx by later theorists, and that, roughly speaking, generally accepted accounting principles can suffice to clarify the issue. (Thinking of Marx more as an accountant than the modern behaviorist-formalist mold of a modern economist definitely does clarify a lot, I'll add.)
What made this paper particularly interesting is that he hadn't included a single TSSI source. He'd been in touch, ironically, with Mohun -- who I doubt was keen to recommend it, but admittedly this is speculative on my part. More specifically, Bryer had remarked that he had been "trying to persuade Simon Mohun to take an interest in accounting," but did not feel that he had succeeded.
I don't want to claim credit for anything, since it seems that one Julian Wells had been contacting him about it around the same time I had, and that he was abstractly aware of TSSI as a literature. Nevertheless, he subsequently engaged with the interpretation and came down firmly on its side. A rewrite of his essay (circa September 2014) included a fairly ringing endorsement, along with what he had described as "clarifying qualifications" that he hoped would shed further light on the matter. The final version of this essay later became the fifth chapter in his 2017 book, "Accounting for Value in Marx's Capital."
Anyway, I was just thinking that book might be worth a look, if accounting is an angle that tickles your fancy.
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