Tuesday, March 16, 2021

Private Truths, Public Lies In Mainstream Economics?

I sometimes wonder if most mainstream economists think that most of what they were taught, teach, and research are some combination of false, incoherent, and useless for understanding actually existing capitalism. But they go along out of some sense of professionalism and a belief that their colleagues do not share their views. That is many privately think they are a minority of one, but publically espouse the orthodoxy.

As far as professionalism goes, I suppose some believe that those who go on from their microeconomics class, for example, are expected to have been exposed to certain material. I would hope that some question the ethics of not letting the students know that they are being taught one approach, named marginalism, and other approaches exist.

Maybe one of these days, I will read Timur Kuran's book.

5 comments:

Marxist said...

Hello, Robert, I would like to know if you can, if not difficult, make a post about methodology in the empirical proof of labor theory of value? As for the input-output tables, vertically integrated labor costs (just reading the work of Passineti and Ian Vright, I did not understand anything), data sources (or, rather, databases of statistical data). I would be very grateful, just because of the language barrier and, so far, a low understanding of mathematics, I can not fully understand the work of Sheikh, Cockshott&Cottrell et al. marxist economists who prove LTV empirically. Thank you again.

Marxist said...

And please write about it in an easy and understandable language for a wide audience (that is, for me). I'm sorry if I interrupted you in any way.

Anonymous said...

You have on a recent book edited honoring Stefano Zambelli an article from Anwar Shaikh exactly on that topic. I recall it been named Marx and the other Sraffa.

Robert Vienneau said...

It will take me a while to do this.

Ronald Miller and Peter Blair's book is the most comprehensive textbook I know about Leontief input-output analysis. They call labor values 'employment multipliers'.

The book for the Zambelli festschrift is here.

I cannot seem to find make and use tables for the US National Income and Product Accounts here or here. NIPAs for a variety of countries are available from the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP), from the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), or somewhere from theOrganization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Marxist said...

Thank you very much!