Neutral Technical Progress and the Measure of Value: Along the Kaldor-Kennedy Line
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1 Introduction 2 the Economics of Imperfect Competition
Notes 1 Introduction 1. It should be noted that Joan Robinson might have been very angry at being so described. Marjorie Turner, in discussing Mary Paley Marshall’s reaction to The Economics of Imperfect Competition (Robinson, 1933a), points out that Joan Robinson ‘thought of her own reputation as being that of an economist and not a woman-economist’ (Turner, 1989, 12–13; see also below, 8–9. 2. Luigi Pasinetti brilliantly describes their approaches and interrelationships, and evaluates their collective contributions in his entry on Joan Robinson in The New Palgrave (Pasinetti, 1987; see also 2007). 3. The editors of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, of which she was a Patron, had been preparing a special issue in honour of her eightieth birthday. Sadly, it had to be a Memorial issue instead (see the special issue of December 1983). 4. For an absorbing account of the Maurice debates and the events and issues surrounding them, see Wilson and Prior (2004, 2006). 5. In private conversation with GCH. 6. It was widely thought at Cambridge, in pre- and post-war years, that Marjorie Tappan-Hollond was responsible for Joan Robinson never being elected to a teaching fellowship at Girton (it was only after Joan Robinson retired that she became an Honorary Fellow of Girton and the Joan Robinson Society, which met on 31 October (her birth date) each year, was started). Marjorie Turner documents that there was mutual personal affection between them and even concern on Tappan-Hollond’s part for her former pupil but that she strongly disapproved of Joan Robinson’s ‘messianic’ approach to teaching. -
Joan Robinson from the Generalization of the General Theory to the Development of an 'Anglo-Italian' Cambridge Tradition
Joan Robinson from the generalization of the General Theory to the development of an ‘Anglo-Italian’ Cambridge tradition Yara Zeineddine – PhD Candidate, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, PHARE Abstract The project of developing a synthesis between Post-Keynesians and Neo-Ricardians (known as the post-classical synthesis) is almost as old as the development of Post-Keynesian economics. In this paper, I highlight one of the first attempts to such a synthesis: that of Joan Robinson. After the publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes 1936), Joan Robinson (1903-1983) gave herself the mission of disseminating Keynes’s message through vulgarizing his approach (Robinson 1936) and extending it to the long period (Robinson 1937). She deplored that Keynes did not study the long period well enough to assess the effects of the modification of productive capacity on the economy, and hence to discuss the determination of profits in the long term. However, her Essays in the Theory of Employment (1937) was criticized by Keynes himself (Kregel 1983) as he rejected her application of marginal analysis to a heterogeneous stock of capital. Following this, Robinson found a new inspiration in Sraffa’s introduction to Ricardo’s Principles (1951) as she acknowledged it in the foreword of The Accumulation of capital (Robinson 1956). There, she clearly pursues her objective of extending Keynes’s analysis to the long period, using this time the classics’ approach as depicted by Sraffa in 1951. From this point on, extending Keynes’s analysis to the long period meant to her conciliating Sraffa’s approach with Keynes’s analysis of the short period (Rima 1991, Robinson 1977, Turner 1989) in what she called the “Anglo-Italian” Cambridge tradition. -
Spring Cleaning Joan Robinson I Am One of the Few Survivors of the Generation That Learned Economic Theory Before the Keynesian
Spring Cleaning Joan Robinson I am one of the few survivors of the generation that learned economic theory before the Keynesian revolution. Alfred Marshall was the over- mastering influence on teaching in the English-speaking world. There were many disputed points within the Marshallian canon, such as the meaning of the "representative firm", but other schools - Walras, Pareto, the Austrians - were dismissed in footnotes. We used to say in Cambridge "Everything is in Marshall". I added later: the trouble is that everything eise is as well. The general practical moral of Marshallian teaching was the defense of laisser faire. Interference with the "free play of market forces", however well meant, will do more harm than good. Thus the devastating unemployment of the 1930s and Keynes' plea to do something about it created a confrontation. Everything is in Marshall. The most coherent and useable part of Marshall's theory is the analysis of the Short Period. The short period is not a length of time, but a Situation at a moment of time when equipment and stocks of inputs in existence and the available labour force provide for a potential supply of Output which may be less or more fully utilised. Marshall, using his one at a time method, analysed this question in terms of the fishing industry. Keynes adapted it to deal with changes in the general level of effective demand in an industrial economy. The coverage of the General Theory, is narrow. It says very little about international trade. The influence of the flow of investment on employ- ment is a central topic but accumulation as a historical process is very scrappily dealt with; the distribution of the flow of gross income between wages and profits is discussed but the formation of an overall 175 rate of profit is left hazy. -
Theory of Wages
THE THEORY OF WAGES BY J. R. HICKS, M.A., B.LrTT. Fellow of AU Srnd• CoUeue and Drum'IMTUl ProfeiBQ7' of Political Economv in the Uniwrlity of OxfQ7'd PALGRAVE MACMILLAN 1963 Copyright © J. R. Hicks 1963 First Edition 1932 Second Edition 1963 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 2nd edition 1963 978-0-333-02764-6 MACMILLAN AND COMPANY LIMITED StMartin's Street London WC 2 also Bombay Calcutta Madras Melbourne THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED Toronto ISBN 978-1-349-00191-0 ISBN 978-1-349-00189-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-00189-7 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION THIS is only the second (regular) edition of a book which was first published in 1932 and which has been out of print in the United Kingdom for more than twenty years. I let it go out of print because my own views upon its subject had changed so much that I no longer desired to be represented by it. It has, however, been made clear to me that there is still a demand for it; not, I hope, because anyone wants to use the greater part of it as a source of direct instruction, but because there are several parts of it which are still alive in the sense that they provide convenient starting-points for much more modern discussion. References to it have indeed become too frequent for it to be left unavailable. That is the reason why I have finally decided that it ought to appear in a new edition; it also explains why the new edition has had to take so peculiar a form. -
Measuring the Bias of Technological Change*
Measuring the Bias of Technological Change∗ Ulrich Doraszelski† Jordi Jaumandreu‡ University of Pennsylvania and CEPR Boston University and CEPR This version: February 2009 New version coming soon: January 2012. Abstract When technological change occurs, it can increase the productivity of capital, labor, and the other factors of production in equal terms or it can be biased towards a specific factor. Whether technological change favors some factors of production over others is an empirical question that is central to economics. The literatures in industrial organization, productivity, and economic growth rest on very specific assumptions about the bias of technological change. Yet, the evidence is sparse. In this paper we propose a general framework for estimating production functions. Using firm-level panel data, we are able to directly assess the bias of technological change by measuring, at the level of the individual firm, how much of technological change is factor neutral and how much of it is labor augmenting. We further relate the speed and the direction of technological change to firms’ R&D activities. ∗We thank Pol Antràs, Matthias Doepke, Michaela Draganska, Chad Jones, Dale Jorgenson, Larry Katz, Pete Klenow, Zhongjun Qu, Matthias Schündeln, and John Van Reenen for helpful discussions. Jaumandreu aknowledges the support of the SCI-FI GLOW European project. Doraszelski and Jaumandreu gratefully aknowledge financial support .from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0924380/0924282. †Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. E-mail: [email protected]. ‡Department of Economics, Boston University, 270 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215, USA. E-mail: [email protected]. -
What Has Become of the Keynesian Revolution? Joan Robinson* In
in Joan Robinson, ed., After Keynes, 1973 1 Papers presented to Section F (Economics) at the 1972 Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science What has become of the Keynesian Revolution? Joan Robinson* I what was the dominant orthodoxy against which the Keynesian revolution was raised? The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money was not published till 1936 but the revolution began to stir in 1929, lurched forward in 1931 and grew urgent with the grim events of 1933. In those years British orthodoxy was still dominated by nostalgia for the world before 1914. Then there was normality and equilibrium. To get back to that happy state, its institutions and its policies should be restored—keep to the gold standard at the old sterling parity, balance the budget, maintain free trade and observe the strictest laissez faire in the relations of government with industry. When Lloyd George proposed a campaign to reduce unemployment (which was then at the figure of one million or more) by expenditure on public works, he was answered by the famous ‘Treasury View’ that there is a certain amount of saving at any moment, available to finance investment, and if the government borrows a part, there will be so much the less for industry. In 1931, when the world crisis had produced a sharp increase in the deficit on the U.K. balance of payments, the appropriate remedy (approved as much by the unlucky Labour government as by the Bank of England) was to cut expenditure so as to balance the budget. -
JOAN ROBINSON's CHALLENGES on HOW to CONSTRUCT a POST-KEYNESIAN ECONOMIC THEORY Maria Cristina Marcuzzo* 1. Premise There Is
Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi Volume LII, December 2018: 119-134 JOAN ROBINSON’S CHALLENGES ON HOW TO CONSTRUCT A POST-KEYNESIAN ECONOMIC THEORY Maria Cristina Marcuzzo* ABSTRACT This paper examines some of the challenges raised by Joan Robinson in con- structing a Post-Keynesian economic theory, with the intent to provide some assess- ment of their relevance today. Rather than dwell on her criticisms of neoclassical economics and of the Neoclassical synthesis, on which much has already been writ- ten (even though, unfortunately, not taken on board by mainstream economics), the focus here is on her arguments on how to construct a Post-Keynesian economic theory, possibly now forgotten or at any rate neglected. It is argued that there is still much to be learnt by reviving them today. Keywords: Joan Robinson, Post-Keynesian Economic Theory, Critique of Mainstream Eco- nomics. JEL codes: B200, B300, B310. To me, the expression post-Keynesian has a defi- nite meaning; it applies to an economic theory or method of analysis which takes account of the dif- ference between the future and the past. J.V. Robinson [1978a] in FCM: 78 1. Premise There is a generation of economists for whom Joan Robinson is no more than a name buried in a footnote in old-fashioned microeconomic textbooks, linking her to the notion of imperfect competition. For my gen- eration, it is a name reminding us of the “revolutionary” spirit of the 1960s * Sapienza, Università di Roma. Address for correspondence: cristina.marcuzzo@uni- roma1.it ISSN: 2532-4969 doi: 10.26331/1057 120 MARIA CRISTINA MARCUZZO and early 1970s, when she became an icon of various strands of hetero- doxy. -
Cambridge Economics Through the Magnifying Glass
WORKING WITH ARCHIVES: CAMBRIDGE ECONOMICS THROUGH THE MAGNIFYING GLASS Maria Cristina Marcuzzo1 Marcuzzo, M.C. (2012). Working with archives: Cambridge economics through the magnifying glass. Cuadernos de Economía, 31(58), 5-21. La investigación en economía empleando archivos documentales permite inter- pretaciones más claras sobre las ideas y desarrollo de las mismas a través del tiem- po; el contexto de escritura en relación con interlocutores y antagonistas; y la naturaleza de los problemas abordados. En este documento se presentan ejemplos de trabajo con borradores, correspondencia, tablas de contenido, notas, y materi- al relacionado, de cuatro economistas del “Grupo de Cambridge”: Piero Sraffa, Richard Kahn, Joan Robinson y John Maynard Keynes. En cada caso se describen los hallazgos e importancia de la investigación realizada en los archivos. Palabras clave: pensamiento económico, historia económica, P. Sraffa, R. Kahn, J. Robinson, J.M. Keynes, heurística. JEL: B10, B20, B31, B24. 1M.sc. Economics (LSE), currently she is performs as Full Professor in Political Economy, Sapien- za, University of Rome. E-mail: [email protected]. Mailing address: Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche, Università di Roma “La Sapienza” Viale Regina Elena, 295 - palazzina G, 00161 (Roma, Italia). An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Workshop on Research projects in the history and philosophy of economics”, Pisa, December 2009; it was translated into Chinese and published in Review of the History of Economic Thought 5(7), 2010, pp. 160-75. This article was received on January 15 2012, and its publication was approved on July 10 2012. 5 6 Cuadernos de Economía, 31(57), julio-diciembre de 2012 Marcuzzo, M.C. -
Marx on Absolute and Relative Wages
Munich Personal RePEc Archive Marx on absolute and relative wages Levrero, Enrico Sergio Roma Tre University, Department of Economics September 2009 Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20976/ MPRA Paper No. 20976, posted 26 Feb 2010 06:51 UTC Marx on absolute and relative wages Enrico Sergio Levrero, Department of Economics, Roma Tre University∗ Introduction 1. The aim of this paper is to clarify some aspects of Marx’s analysis of the determinants of wages and of the peculiarity of labour as a commodity, concentrating upon three related issues. The first is that of Marx’s notion of the subsistence (or natural) wage rate: subsistence wage will be shown to stem, according to Marx, from socially determined conditions of reproduction of an efficient labouring class. The second issue refers to the distinction between the natural and the market wage rate that can be found in Marx, and his critique of Ricardo’s analysis of the determinants of the price of labour. Here the “law of population peculiar to capitalist mode of production” (that is, Marx’s industrial reserve army mechanism) will be considered, both with respect to cyclical fluctuations of wages and to their trend over time. Moreover, a classification of the social and institutional factors affecting the average wage rate will be advanced. Finally, Marx’s analysis of the effects of technical progress on both absolute and relative wages will be considered, also relating it back to the long-standing debate on the Marxian law of the falling rate of profit, and addressing some possible scenarios of the trend of wages and distribution. -
Nine Lives of Neoliberalism
A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Plehwe, Dieter (Ed.); Slobodian, Quinn (Ed.); Mirowski, Philip (Ed.) Book — Published Version Nine Lives of Neoliberalism Provided in Cooperation with: WZB Berlin Social Science Center Suggested Citation: Plehwe, Dieter (Ed.); Slobodian, Quinn (Ed.); Mirowski, Philip (Ed.) (2020) : Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, ISBN 978-1-78873-255-0, Verso, London, New York, NY, https://www.versobooks.com/books/3075-nine-lives-of-neoliberalism This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/215796 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative -
CR Traverse Analysis Progenitors & Pioneers
Traverse Analysis: Progenitors and Pioneers 14th History of Economic Thought Society of Australia Conference The University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. 11th July 2001 Colin Richardson* School of Economics University of Tasmania ABSTRACT Traverse analysis has two progenitors (David Ricardo, Karl Marx) and five pioneers: Michal Kalecki, Adolph Lowe, Joan Robinson, J.R. Hicks, and John Hicks. Defined as the dynamic disequilibrium adjustment-path that connects an initial with a different terminal state of economic growth, the traverse comes in four “flavours”. There are neoclassical (J.R. Hicks), neo-Austrian (John Hicks), observed (Ricardo, Marx, Kalecki, Robinson), and instrumental (Lowe) traverses. These terms are explained and the seven seminal contributions are summarised and commented upon in this paper. * I am indebted to Dr Jerry Courvisanos for his supervision and comments in writing this paper. Scholarship support from The University of Tasmania is also gratefully acknowledged. 2 Introduction Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow once quipped: “The traverse is the easiest part of skiing but the most difficult part of economics”. Later, Joseph Halevi and Peter Kriesler (1992, p 225) complained that “The traverse is at the same time one of the most important concepts in economic theory, and also one of the most neglected.” This paper outlines briefly the history of economic thought between 1821 and 1973 concerning this difficult, important and neglected theoretical construct. Traverse analysis has two progenitors (David Ricardo, Karl Marx) and five pioneers: Michal Kalecki, Adolph Lowe, Joan Robinson, J.R. Hicks, and John Hicks. Defined as the dynamic disequilibrium adjustment-path that connects an initial with a different terminal state of economic growth, the traverse comes in four “flavours”. -
Pragmatism As a Pillar of the New Developmentalism Pragmatismo Como Um Pilar Do Novo Desenvolvimentismo
Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, vol 40, nº 2, pp 376-397, April-June/2020 Pragmatism as a pillar of the New Developmentalism Pragmatismo como um pilar do Novo Desenvolvimentismo JOÃO PAIVA-SILVA*,** RESUMO: Os estudiosos do Novo Desenvolvimentismo geraram um corpo substancial de conhecimento sobre a transformação estrutural e as políticas que devem ser adotadas para promover sua conquista. No entanto, como é discutido neste artigo, o Novo Desenvolvi- mentismo, em contraste com o Neoliberalismo, carece de uma base filosófica sólida para legitimar as políticas que favorecem por outros motivos que não a capacidade de gerar prosperidade. Também se argumenta que os novos-desenvolvimentistas deveriam adotar explicitamente uma filosofia pragmática para se tornar uma alternativa mais séria a outras doutrinas da economia política. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Filosofia econômica; história do pensamento econômico; desenvolvi- mento econômico; Novo Desenvolvimentismo; institucionalismo. ABSTRACT: The scholars of New Developmentalism have generated a substantial body of knowledge regarding structural transformation and the policies that should be adopted to foster its achievement. Nevertheless, as is argued in this paper, New Developmentalism, by contrast with Neoliberalism, lacks a strong philosophical foundation to legitimise the poli- cies it favours on grounds other than their ability to generate prosperity. It is also argued that new-developmentalists should explicitly adopt a pragmatic philosophy in order to be- come a more serious alternative to other political economy doctrines. KEYWORDS: Economic philosophy; history of economic thought; economic development; New Developmentalism; institutionalism. JEL Classification: A13; B5; O10. * Centre for African and Development Studies – Lisbon School of Economics and Management – Uni- versity of Lisbon, Lisboa/Portugal.