DOCSLIB.ORG

WICKSELL on WALRAS's EARLY TREATMENT of CAPITAL and INTEREST by ANDREA IMPERIA1, VINCENZO MAFFEO2 and FABIO RAVAGNANI3 Abstract

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
WICKSELL on WALRAS's EARLY TREATMENT of CAPITAL and INTEREST by ANDREA IMPERIA1, VINCENZO MAFFEO2 and FABIO RAVAGNANI3 Abstract WICKSELL ON WALRAS'S EARLY TREATMENT OF CAPITAL AND INTEREST BY ANDREA IMPERIA1, VINCENZO MAFFEO2 AND FABIO RAVAGNANI3 Abstract In this paper we examine the criticism that Knut Wicksell advanced against Walras’s treatment of capital and interest at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the views of two distinguished followers of Walras concerning the points raised by the Swedish economist. As regards the first aspect, it should be noted that the criticism put forward by Wicksell at that time refers to the earlier editions of the Éléments, in which circulating capital is excluded from the analysis. We thus endeavour to clarify Wicksell’s remarks on the consequences of that exclusion for both the representation of the social production process and the determination of the interest rate. As to the second aspect, our discussion indicates that the appropriate way of treating the capitalistic element of production was an unsettled issue within the small circle of Walras’s followers at the end of the nineteenth century. 1: Department of Social and Economic Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy. Email: [email protected]. 2: Department of Social and Economic Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy. Email: [email protected]. 3: Department of Economics and Law, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]. This “preprint” is the peer-reviewed and accepted typescript of an article that is forthcoming in revised form, after minor editorial changes, in the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (ISSN: 1053-8372), volume 40 (2018), issue TBA. Copyright to the journal’s articles is held by the History of Economics Society (HES), whose exclusive licensee and publisher for the journal is Cambridge University Press (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the- history-of-economic-thought ). This preprint may be used only for private research and study and is not to be distributed further. The preprint may be cited as follows: Imperia, Andrea, Maffeo, Vincenzo, and Ravagnani, Fabio. “Wicksell on Walras’s Early Treatment of Capital and Interest.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 40 (forthcoming). Preprint at SocArXiv, osf.io/preprints/socarxiv 2 1. Introduction Among the scholars of his time, Knut Wicksell was one of those who devoted more attention to Walras’s theory of capital and interest. As is known, for a long time he was highly critical of the French economist in that respect (cf., for example, Stigler 1948, pp. 252-254). In this paper we examine the criticism that Wicksell advanced against Walras’s treatment of capital and interest at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the views of two distinguished followers of Walras concerning the points raised by Wicksell. As regards the first aspect, it should be noted that the criticism put forward by Wicksell at that time refers to the second and third edition of the Éléments, in which circulating capital is excluded from the analysis. We thus endeavour to clarify Wicksell’s remarks on the consequences of that exclusion for both the representation of the social production process and the determination of the interest rate. As to the second aspect, our discussion indicates that the appropriate way of treating the capitalistic element of production within the context of general equilibrium analysis was an unsettled issue among Walras’s followers at the end of the nineteenth century. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 examines the critical assessment of Walras’s theory of capital and interest as put forward by Wicksell in Value, Capital and Rent (1893). Section 3 discusses Vilfredo Pareto’s views on one of the points raised by Wickell, as they emerge from the first volume of the Cours d’Economie Politique (1896), and Enrico Barone’s (1895, 1896) reply to Wicksell (a letter by Barone to Wicksell concerning this reply is reproduced, for the first time in its wholeness, in the Appendix). Section 4 documents the persistence of Wicksell’s criticism after Barone’s reply and offers an interpretation for this fact. Section 5 draws conclusions. 2. Wicksell’s early assessment of Walras’s theory of capital and interest: Value, Capital and Rent (1893) 2.1 Wicksell’s position on capital and distribution In Value, Capital and Rent, Wicksell (1893, p. 94) ascribes to Walras the merit of having made, through “the equations of production”, the only successful attempt “to 3 do justice of [the] reciprocal relations” between the price and the cost of production of commodities; in other words, the merit of having treated those relations from the perspective of general economic equilibrium. At the same time, however, he contends that Walras’s concept of capital is “old-fashioned and one-sided” (1893, p. 21) and that the Walrasian analysis of production, distribution and exchange needs to be completed with Böhm-Bawerk’s theory of capital.1 As Wicksell points out, Böhm-Bawerk’s theory starts from the premise that production requires time. Capital is seen, in its essence, as a fund of means of subsistence that are advanced to workers and landowners for the whole period in which labour and land are employed directly and indirectly in the production of final consumer goods. At any given moment in time, this fund mostly appears in the economy in the form of raw materials, unfinished products and other capital goods that will be gradually transformed into consumption goods (Wicksell 1893, pp. 115- 116). In Wicksell’s (and Böhm-Bawerk’s) view, more indirect production methods are associated with longer periods of production. Moreover, it is held that the output per unit of labour increases with the length of the production period. Thus, the role of capital in production “consists…simply and solely in making possible the introduction of a longer period of time between the beginning and the conclusion of the process of production of the commodity concerned and consequently the adoption of a more productive round-about method of production than would be possible if production were less strong in capital or totally devoid of capital” (Wicksell 1893, p. 115). It should be noted that in Value, Capital and Rent Wicksell develops his theory in the hypothesis of a stationary economy in which only circulating capital is employed. As regards the first aspect, he believes that, in a first phase, the theory of interest and the theory of accumulation should be taken into consideration separately, as is usually done for the theory of exchange and the theory of production (Wicksell 1893, p. 21). With that, he does not intend to deny that “the question of the origin of capital interest and that of the origin of interest-bearing capital itself…are related” (1893, p. 21). Wicksell seems merely to hold that the causes which determine the interest rate are broadly independent of those determining the accumulation of capital. In his view, the simplest way to treat the determination of the interest rate 1 The substance of the criticism put forward in Value, Capital and Rent as regards Walras’s theory of capital had been already expounded in Wicksell 1892; cf. Uhr 1962, p. 104. 4 separately from the theory of accumulation is to focus on the case of a “stationary economy in which capital and the other economic factors can be thought of as an approximately unalterable sum” (1893, p. 22). Wicksell seems to believe that in this hypothetical economy the determination of the interest rate must depend on the mere employment of a given quantity of capital in production, beside labour and land, and not on the conditions of its accumulation. As regards the hypothesis that only circulating capital is employed in production,2 in order to understand Wicksell’s position it is useful to consider his classification “of the different capitals…according to their durability” (1893, p. 105). Wicksell argues that “consumable or quickly exhausted” means of production, together with “the consumer goods [that] are not yet in the hands of consumers” and are therefore susceptible of being advanced to workers as means of subsistence, must be regarded as “capital in the narrower sense”. Then he distinguishes this first category of goods from the “highly durable goods” such as “productive buildings, factories, store-houses, railways, etc.”, which are remunerated only in proportion to their scarcity, without any noteworthy influence of the original costs of production. Wicksell states that the latter goods “must be placed, economically speaking, in the same category as landed property itself” and calls them rent-goods (1893, pp. 118- 119). Moreover, he asserts that rent-goods do not play any role in determining the rate of interest (1893, p. 119) and finally remarks that, in a stationary economy, rent- goods “are not produced at all, but kept in the same good condition” (1893, p. 162; emphasis added). In the foregoing classification, the machines of comparatively low durability are implicitly included among the “capital goods in the narrow sense” that are relevant for the determination of the interest rate (1893, p. 118). However, the treatment of comparatively short-lived machines was an unsettled issue to Wicksell. 3 This fact may explain why, in the subsequent development of the analysis, he does not take them into consideration but simply reasserts that rent-goods play no 2 In Wicksell’s theory all the means of productions, “once the production process is complete and the goods are ready,...are assumed to be worn out and valueless” (1893, p. 120). 3 As Wicksell himself will admit in the review of Åkerman’s study of durable capital, “[the problem created by durable capital] is so complex that the vast majority of economists, including the reviewer, have almost entirely passed it by as being much too difficult to be susceptible to analysis” (1923, p.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Notion of Market Power in the Italian Marginalist School: Vilfredo Pareto and Enrico Barone
    This version: July 2005 The notion of market power in the Italian marginalist school: Vilfredo Pareto and Enrico Barone Manuela Mosca* Abstract The paper deals with the notion of market power in the writings of two well-known Italian marginalists: Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), and Enrico Barone (1859-1924). It brings into focus the two economists’ definition of the sources of market power, the kind of entry barriers the identified, and the role they attributed to potential competition. It shows that even if Pareto and Barone did not provide original analytical contributions to the solution of the models of price determination in imperfectly competitive markets, they should still have a place in the history of the theory of non-competitive markets for their theoretical innovations concerning the causes of market power. Keywords : market power, marginalism. J.E.L. Classification: B13, D4 Address for correspondence: Manuela Mosca University of Lecce, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Matematico-Statistiche, Ecotekne, Via per Monteroni, 73100 Lecce (Italy). E-mail: [email protected] * A previous version of this paper was presented at HES 2005 Conference. 32 nd Annual Meeting. Tacoma 24-27th June, 2005. I am grateful to S. Abu Turab Rizvi for helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies. Any opinions expressed in the papers included into the Quaderni del Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Matematico- Statistiche are those of the authors. Citation and use of these papers should consider their provisional character. 1. Introduction This paper analyses the notions of competition and monopoly power in the writings of two well-known Italian marginalists: Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) and Enrico Barone (1859-1924).
    [Show full text]
  • Market Socialism: a Subjectivist Evaluation
    7'he lourno1 of Libem"m Sludier. Vol. V, No. 1 (Winter 1981) Market Socialism: A Subjectivist Evaluation by Robert Bradley, Jr. Department of Economics, University of Houston This essay is an attempt to provide a modern overview of the economic cal- culation debate from the Austrian School perspective. Specifically, the many arguments against market socialism will be consolidated to demon- strate the neglected theoretical strength of the free-market perspective. In this regard, the fact that market socialism never has been implemented or even become a ballot box alternative can be better understood. The seeds of the calculation debate had been planted by a host of economists before Ludwig von Mises posed the central question "in such a form as to make it impossible that it should ever again disappear."' Mises' article, adapted from a lecture of a year earlier, appeared in the spring of 1920 entitled "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." The famous challenge of Mises was uncompromising and to the point: "Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism: without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic cal~ulation."~Two years later the argument was enlarged in a wide-ranging critique of socialism, entitled Die Gemeinwirtschaft, after which replies from his critics began.3 Mises defended his position in articles published in 1924 and 1928 against, in Hayek's estimation, "objections [that] were really more quibbling about words caused by the fact that Mises had occasionally used the somewhat loose statement that socialism [economic calculation] was impossible.'" The main effect of Mises' arguments has been best summed up by the renowned socialist economist Oskar Lange: "It was [Mises'] powerful challenge that forced the socialists to recognize the importance of an adequate system of economic accounting in a socialist economy.
    [Show full text]
  • An Anarchist FAQ — Section I Contents
    An Anarchist FAQ — Section I Contents Section I: What would an anarchist society look like? 4 I.1 Isn’t libertarian socialism an oxymoron? 12 I.1.1 Is socialism impossible? ................................ 17 I.1.2 Is libertarian communism impossible? ........................ 27 I.1.3 What is wrong with markets anyway? ........................ 39 I.1.4 If capitalism is exploitative, then isn't socialism as well? . 45 I.1.5 Does capitalism efficiently allocate resources? .................... 48 I.2 Is this a blueprint for an anarchist society? 62 I.2.1 Why discuss what an anarchist society would be like at all? . 66 I.2.2 Will it be possible to go straight to an anarchist society from capitalism? . 68 I.2.3 How is the framework of an anarchist society created? . 72 I.3 What could the economic structure of anarchy look like? 79 I.3.1 What is a "syndicate"? ................................. 83 I.3.2 What is workers' self-management? ......................... 90 I.3.3 What does socialisation mean? ............................ 96 I.3.4 What relations would exist between individual syndicates? . 102 I.3.5 What would confederations of syndicates do? . 106 I.3.6 What about competition between syndicates? . 113 I.3.7 What about people who do not want to join a syndicate? . 118 I.3.8 Do anarchists seek "small autonomous communities, devoted to small scale produc- tion"? .......................................... 119 I.4 How would an anarchist economy function? 123 I.4.1 What is the point of economic activity in anarchy? . 127 I.4.2 Why do anarchists desire to abolish work? . 129 I.4.3 How do anarchists intend to abolish work? .
    [Show full text]
  • The Socialist Calculation Debate and New Socialist Models in Light of a Contextual Historical Materialist Interpretation
    THE SOCIALIST CALCULATION DEBATE AND NEW SOCIALIST MODELS IN LIGHT OF A CONTEXTUAL HISTORICAL MATERIALIST INTERPRETATION by Adam Balsam BSc [email protected] Supervised by Justin Podur BSc MScF PhD A Major Paper submitted to the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Environmental Studies York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada December 11, 2020 Table of Contents The Statement of Requirements for the Major Paper ................................................................................. iii Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................ iv Foreword ...................................................................................................................................................... vi Section I: Introduction, Context, Framework and Methodology .................................................................. 1 Preamble ............................................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 4 Context of this Investigation ................................................................................................................. 5 The Possibilities of Socialist Models ..................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Socialism, Economic Calculation And
    SOCIALISM, ECONOMIC CALCULATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP BY Jesús Huerta de Soto TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................. 1 1. SOCIALISM AND ECONOMIC ANALYSIS .................................................... 1 The Historic Failure of Socialism ........................................................................ 1 The Subjective Perspective in the Economic Analysis of Socialism ................... 3 Our Definition of Socialism ................................................................................. 4 Entrepreneurship and Socialism ........................................................................... 5 Socialism as an Intellectual Error ......................................................................... 6 2. THE DEBATE ON THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SOCIALIST ECONOMIC 7 CALCULATION .................................................................................................. Ludwig von Mises and the Start of the Socialism Debate .................................... 7 The Unjustified Shift in the Debate toward Statics .............................................. 8 Oskar Lange and the “Competitive Solution” ...................................................... 9 “Market Socialism” as the Impossible Squaring of the Circle ............................. 9 3. OTHER POSSIBLE LINES OF RESEARCH ..................................................... 10 1. The Analysis of So-called “Self-Management Socialism” ............................. 10 2. “Indicative
    [Show full text]
  • Curriculum Vitae Michael Edward Bradley
    CURRICULUM VITAE MICHAEL EDWARD BRADLEY EDUCATION: Ph.D. 1967 Cornell University Major Field: Labor Economics Minor Fields: Economic Theory (History of Economic Thought) Economics of Planning Dissertation: Wage Determination and Incentive Problems in Soviet Agriculture M.S. 1963 Cornell University Major Field: Labor Economics Minor Field: International and Comparative Labor Problems Thesis: Some Aspects of the Labor Supply Problem in Underdeveloped Countries A.B. 1961 Albion College Majors: Economics and History Experience in Higher Education: 2011-2014 UMBC, Chair, Department of Economics 2009-2014 UMBC, Undergraduate Program Director, Department of Economics, 1989-2014 UMBC, Professor of Economics 1991-2002 UMBC, Director of International Programs 1989-1990 Colgate University, Visiting Professor of Economics 1981-1997 The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Professorial Lecturer in International Economics 1984-1988 U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Institute, Instructor in Economics 1981-1997 The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Adjunct Member, Graduate Faculty 1980-1982 UMBC, Director, Administrative and Managerial Sciences Program 1972- UMBC, Regular member, Graduate Faculty 1971-1989 UMBC, Associate Professor of Economics 1970-1971 Cornell University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University MICHAEL EDWARD BRADLEY 2 CURRICULUM VITAE 1966-1971 The Pennsylvania State University, Assistant Professor of Economics Courses
    [Show full text]
  • Friedrich Von Hayek: the Socialist-Calculation Debate, Knowledge Arguments, and Modern Economic Development Cara Elliott
    Volume 5 Article 6 2011 Friedrich von Hayek: The oS cialist-Calculation Debate, Knowledge Arguments, And Modern Economic Development Cara A. Elliott Gettysburg College Class of 2011 Follow this and additional works at: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/ger Part of the Economic History Commons, Economic Policy Commons, Economic Theory Commons, International Economics Commons, Macroeconomics Commons, Political Economy Commons, and the Public Economics Commons Share feedback about the accessibility of this item. Elliott, Cara A. (2011) "Friedrich von Hayek: The ocS ialist-Calculation Debate, Knowledge Arguments, And Modern Economic Development," Gettysburg Economic Review: Vol. 5 , Article 6. Available at: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/ger/vol5/iss1/6 This open access article is brought to you by The uC pola: Scholarship at Gettysburg College. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of The uC pola. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Friedrich von Hayek: The oS cialist-Calculation Debate, Knowledge Arguments, And Modern Economic Development Abstract At the close of the nineteenth and the commencement of the twentieth century, socialism began to gain momentum as a large-scale movement in Europe and the United States. This popularity was supported by an increased influence of the working class in society, which put pressure for representation upon European parliaments and began to secure concrete improvements in labor protection laws. Moreover, socialist proponents looked hopefully towards the living example of the Soviet Union, which began its socialist experiment in 1917 following the success of the Bolshevik Revolution. Socialism, which found its economic grounding in the legacies of such men as David Ricardo and Karl Marx, tended to encourage a more central and vital role for government intervention in the economy.
    [Show full text]
  • Why Schumpeter Got It Wrong in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
    Why Schumpeter got it Wrong in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Herbert Gintis Challenge Magazine August 1990 1 Introduction Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy is above all an exer- cise in prediction. Born in the English Industrial Revolution and thrust into promi- nence by its successes in France, Germany, and the United States, capitalism had existed for more than a century when Schumpeter began to assemble the material for his book. Socialism had a much shorter history. A constant theme in workers’ movements, socialism first became tangible through the establishment of the So- viet economic system scarcely twenty-five years before Schumpeter wrote. Despite this disparity in age, and with no empirical indication of the newcomer’s practical viability, Schumpeter boldly proclaimed socialism the new order, while judging capitalism as doomed to extinction. The power of Schumpeter’s argument was immediately apparent to his con- temporaries. By both supporting capitalism and predicting its inevitable demise, Schumpeter established himself as a true iconoclast. He moreover abandoned the two central intellectual reference points around which the capitalism-socialism de- bate had traditionally turned: on the one hand philosophical arguments concerning the validity of historical materialism, and on the other hand economic arguments concerning the viability of the command economy. Having no need for general theories of history, Marxian or liberal, Schumpeter rejected the former pure and simple; and being quite confident in the ability of the socialist economy to operate efficiently, he sided unequivocally with Enrico Barone and the socialists in their famous dispute with the arch-defenders of private property, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Misses.
    [Show full text]
  • Bruno Leoni and the Socialist Economic Calculation Debate
    BRUNO LEONI AND THE SOCIALIST ECONOMIC CALCULATION DEBATE CARMELO FERLITO* Fecha de recepción: 25 de junio de 2012. Fecha de aceptación: 19 de diciembre de 2012. Resumen: La contribución italiana al debate sobre el cálculo económico socialista (SECD) no puede limitarse a las aportaciones importantes y funda - mentales de Pareto y Barone. De hecho, si sus contribuciones son todavía ambiguas y tenemos que esperar al trabajo de Mises de 1920 para obtener las aclaraciones necesarias, durante la década de los sesenta Bruno Leoni siguió los pasos de los austriacos en lo referente a este tema, estimulando en Italia un gran debate. El papel de Bruno Leoni es importante debido al debate que promueve y a los académicos que implica, pero también porque sitúa la cuestión del cálculo económico socialista en el contexto más amplio del Estado de Derecho. Palabras clave: Bruno Leoni, debate sobre el cálculo económico socialista, Economía Austriaca. Clasificación JEL: B25, P21, P22. Abstract: The Italian contribution to the Socialist Economic Calculation Debate (SECD) cannot be limited to the important and fundamental works by Pareto and Barone. In fact, if their contributions are still ambiguous and we have to wait for the Mises’ paper in 1920 in order to get the needed clarifications, during the 1960s Bruno Leoni follows the Austrian footsteps on the topic, stimulating in Italy a great debate. Bruno Leoni’s role is important because of the debate he promotes and the scholars he involves, but also because he places the matter of the socialist economic calculation in the broader context of the rule of law.
    [Show full text]
  • The Economic and Political Consequences of the End of Communism
    The Road From Serjdom: The Economic and Political Consequences of the End of Communism. By Robert Skidelsky. Men Lane: Penguin Press, 1 996 f Robert Skidelsky is right, the twentieth century has been dominated by a conflict that ought never to have happened. Throughout most of the century, collectivism was the order of the day. (By a collectivist society, Skidelsky means "one in which state purposes have replaced private pur- posesI in shaping economic and social life" [p. 171). No longer, American and European intellectuals held, could a nation's economy be entrusted to private enterprise. The immense efforts at national unity manifest during the world wars, not to mention the glories of Bolshevism, demonstrated what state direc- tion could achieve. Only since the 1980s has this roseate view of state power encountered attacks among the self-styled intellectual elite. As Skidelsky fully recognizes, collectivism from the first was a false path. "Enrico Barone (1908) and Ludwig von Mises (1920) had argued that efficient Communism was an impossible dream because if all capital were publicly owned there would be no market for capital goods in terms of which competing investment projects could be properly costed" (p. 80). Incidentally, Skidelsky deserves credit for defying the legend, propagated by Schumpeter, that Barone had refuted Mises in advance of his 1920 article. True enough, not all collectivism takes the explicit form of socialism. But, as Mises also demonstrated, intervention offers no "third way" between capital- ism and a fully-collectivized economy. Interference with the market inevitably fails to secure the results its advocates promise.
    [Show full text]
  • Socialist Calculation and Market Socialism
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Munich Personal RePEc Archive MPRA Munich Personal RePEc Archive Socialist Calculation and Market Socialism Paul Jael May 2015 Online at http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/64255/ MPRA Paper No. 64255, posted 10. May 2015 13:18 UTC Socialist Calculation and Market Socialism 1 Socialist Calculation and Market Socialism Paul Jael May 2015 Abstract This paper focuses on the debate held in the twenties and thirties of the last century between libertarian economists and socialist economists, following the denial by the first ones of the feasibility of a socialist economy. This controversy is well known to specialists and has been widely commented. It seemed to me useful to initiate non- specialists in an original way: by having the controversy speaking by itself. We review the main contributions and summarise their arguments with, initially, the bare minimum of personal comments. Walrasian general equilibrium serves as a reference for the defenders of market socialism in the controversy. But the concept of competition behind this theory is very incomplete; it is purely passive. It follows that the market socialism which emanates from it is not really a MARKET socialism. It is lacking the competition which innovates. Markets for capital goods are also lacking in theses models. Our paper then turns to a new generation of socialist models involving this real competition. We review two models proposed by Bardhan and Roemer and then exhibit a personal model. This type of model is facing a modern criticism whose central concept is the "soft budget constraint".
    [Show full text]
  • Socialism and the Market: Methodological Lessons from in the Economic Calculation Debate
    SOCIALISM AND THE MARKET: METHODOLOGICAL LESSONS FROM IN THE ECONOMIC CALCULATION DEBATE KAMRAN NAYERI 1 For presentation at “The Work of Karl Marx and challenges for the XXI Century” conference, Institute of Philosophy, Havana, Cuba, May 5-7, 2003. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at a meeting of the Union for Radical Political Economics, Allied Social Sciences Associations, New Orleans, January 4-7, 2001. INDEX I. INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................................. 1 II. THE EMERGENCE OF NEOCLASSICAL SOCIALISM ................................................................................ 3 III. METHODOLOGIES OF NEOCLASSICAL AND AUSTRIAN CRITIQUES ................................................... 4 IV. ESSENTIAL AND TECHNICAL ISSUES IN SOCIALIST PLANNING.......................................................... 5 V. THE TRANSITION PERIOD.......................................................................................................................... 7 VI. SUMMARY CONCLUSION .......................................................................................................................... 8 VII. REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................................ 8 by Ludwig von Mises (1920) who claimed that I. INTRODUCTION without private property market exchanges could not take place and without them rational 1. There is
    [Show full text]