Saturday, February 27, 2021

Vienneau (2005) Is A Necessary Resource For Arguments About A Minimum Wage

Maybe, perhaps, that is a bit hyperbolic. But it has been known for at least half a century that, even in competitive markets, wages and employment cannot be explained by the interaction of well-behaved supply and demand curves for labor. If you do not want to read me, check out, for example, Garegnani (1970) or Opocher and Steedman (2015). Shove (1933) illustrates how far awareness of the difficulties go. White (2001) is a demonstration that I am not the only one to draw practical conclusions from the theory.

Cohort after cohort, generation after generation, in the supposedly best schools promulgate falsehoods, ignorance, and incoherent nonsense.

References
  • Garegnani, Pierangelo. 1970. Heterogeneous capital, the production function and the theory of distribution. Review of Economic Studies 37(3): 407-436.
  • Opocher, Arrigo and Ian Steedman. 2015. Full Industry Equilibrium: A Theory of the Industrial Long Run Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Shove, G. F. 1933. Review of The Theory of Wages. Economic Journal (Sep.)
  • Vienneau, Robert L. 2005. On labour demand and equilibria of the firm. Manchester School 73(5): 612-619.
  • White, Graham. 2001. The poverty of conventional economic wisdom and the search for alternative economic and social policies Austrlian Review of Public Affairs

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, also W-R frontiers from a Fixed Capital world or a more realistic Joint-Production ones are unexplored resources for arguing for a win-win profit-wage rise.