Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Elsewhere

  • Dean Baker notes problems created by the Cambridge Capital Controversy (CCC) for Krugman's position on capital-intensive technological change. Most of Dean Baker's blog does not have a theoretical flavor, but is more practical.
  • Matt Yglesias notes CCC problems for Krugman's position.
  • A macroeconomist tells the readers to ask him anything on Reddit. (Paul Krugman once did one of these Ask-Me-Anythings.)
  • Maybe one might want to occasionally look at the Ask Social Science and Academic Economics reddits.

3 comments:

Charles Stewart said...

What Dean Baker says sounds to me more like George Soros than Sraffa. I wonder about connections between Soros' notion of reflexivity in finance and the CCC.

It might be tricky - financiers and economists use the word "capital" in different ways, since financiers make a principled distinction between assets and capitalisation.

Robert Vienneau said...

I can see your point, although the CCC has a lot to do with how capital goods are priced.

Charles Stewart said...

Here is a question to sharpen the issue: can we construct an economic model where the nature of assets is so simple that there is no reswitching, but the nature of markets is complex enough that we have Soros-like reflexivity?

Probably not: you would need a model where capital goods exist and affect what production occurs while being so strongly constrained as inputs to productive processes that reswitching arguments don't work.

But even if any such model is quite contrived, it should be enough to show that the Sraffian concept is stronger in the logical sense.