{"title":"What Remains of Sraffa's Economics","authors":"P. Porta","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2288064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2288064","url":null,"abstract":"Recently the Cambridge Journal of Economics have launched a project on New Perspectives on the Work of Piero Sraffa in a Conference and a Special Issue of the Journal. \"Almost two decades after the opening of the Sraffa Archives - the Introduction reads - and 50 years on from the publication of PCMC seemed an appropriate moment to reflect on ongoing debates on Sraffa's overall contribution to economics and, in particular, on the relevance of the opening of the Sraffa Archives in this regard. Does Sraffa's lasting contribution to economic analysis essentially remain limited to PCMC or is it taken beyond this by his unpublished writings? In the latter case, is it possible to identify a distinctive research project that Sraffa had in mind?\". This paper discusses these problems and proposes an answer to both questions. It is argued that the opening of the Archives changes substantially the judgment that can be given of the intellectual legacy of Piero Sraffa. The contributions to the ongoing debate on Piero Sraffa's economics are discussed. It is argued that the publication of Sraffa's literary remains is the necessary step to make the debate more productive.","PeriodicalId":129015,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Marxian; Sraffian; Institutional; Evolutionary (Topic)","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121466452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What Capital has Joined Together, Let Not Marx Rent Asunder: Mark I","authors":"J. Passant","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2190750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2190750","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper I introduce readers to some basic Marxist ideas to help you understand Marx’s thinking on rent and its applicability to the taxation of economic rent, specifically resource rents. I argue that because of the high levels of capital investment in the mining industry, Marx’s concept of absolute rent does not apply but that what he describes as monopoly rent, and differential rent I and II are components of resource rents. The process of taxing resource rents involves a battle between the state as landlord and mining capital as both a new landlord and exploiter of the minerals. That battle is over the split up of the resource monopoly rent inhered in the land but also between the state and mining capital over a share of the monopoly rent mining capital extracts in the process of production from other capital. The taxation of this latter aspect of resource rents acts as an imperfect substitute for competition by lowering the super profits the specific monopolists and oligopolists receive and thus helping to equalize profit rates. Company tax cuts redistribute the monopoly rents obtained during the production process to the other sectors of capital from whom the rent has in their eyes been monopolized.","PeriodicalId":129015,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Marxian; Sraffian; Institutional; Evolutionary (Topic)","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125034549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christian De Cock, Sheena J. Vachhani, J. Murray, Christina Volkmann
{"title":"The Idea of Marx in Financial Times: A Dialectical Reading of Crisis and Recovery","authors":"Christian De Cock, Sheena J. Vachhani, J. Murray, Christina Volkmann","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1765811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1765811","url":null,"abstract":"We introduce the ‘Idea of Marx’ to put into question events and discourses that emerged during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and examine how these coalesced into a particular economic imaginary of ‘recovery’. The ‘engine’ which will allow us to move in the ‘idea of Marx’ goes by the name of the dialectic. In developing the notion of the dialectic we rely heavily on the work of Fredric Jameson and as such this paper can be seen as an attempt to put his theoretical ideas to work. We believe that a dialectical reading of financial press coverage has the potential to challenge the economic imaginary of ‘recovery’, thus keeping the way open for the coming of something (radically) different. In order to put the dialectic into motion we offer four initial wayward theses: 1. There has been no ‘Crisis of Capitalism’ 2. We must change the valence of the GFC from negative to positive 3. The relationship between finance capitalism and ‘free markets’ is deeply problematic 4. We must resist the regulation discourse","PeriodicalId":129015,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Marxian; Sraffian; Institutional; Evolutionary (Topic)","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123957405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Was the Great Depression the Fault of Government and Unions? An Institutional/Keynesian Analysis","authors":"Bruce E. Kaufman","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1889337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1889337","url":null,"abstract":"A growing number of economists blame the length and severity of the Great Depression on factors that rigidified wage rates, raised production costs, and interfered with flexible allocation of labor. The centerpiece of this critique is President Roosevelt‘s New Deal labor program, portrayed as creating a series of large negative supply shocks through encouragement of unions, minimum wages, unemployment insurance, and other anti-competitive industrial relations practices. This paper presents the other side of the story using a combination of institutional and Keynesian theory, drawn principally from the work of J.R. Commons and J.M. Keynes. Both - spending and - industrial relations' rationales for stable wages are developed; also developed is the positive economic case for the New Deal labor program. Attention is called to the long-neglected macroeconomic dimension of industrial relations.","PeriodicalId":129015,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Marxian; Sraffian; Institutional; Evolutionary (Topic)","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123447423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Money, Markets, Meltdown: The 21st-Century Crisis of Labour","authors":"P. Nolan","doi":"10.1111/j.1468-2338.2010.00594.x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2338.2010.00594.x","url":null,"abstract":"Analyses of the global crisis that erupted in 2007 in bank failures, liquidity shortages and business bankruptcies have obscured the connections between the real and monetary economies. Money market fetishism dominates. In the past, theories of economic crisis assigned a key causal role to labour's growing strength. In Britain, the focus of debate was trades unions' allegedly unregulated power at workplace level, but labour's presence and influence in state, business and workplace institutions has since receded. This article attempts to re-insert labour into the contemporary analysis of the crisis and highlights the shifting relations between states, capital and labour in the age of austerity.","PeriodicalId":129015,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Marxian; Sraffian; Institutional; Evolutionary (Topic)","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127163323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Convergence to Natural Prices in Simple Production","authors":"Ian Wright","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1799066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1799066","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes a nonlinear dynamic model of the convergence of market prices to natural prices in a multisector 'simple production' economy under conditions of a constant technique and composition of demand. Prices and quantities adjust in real time according to the classical principle of cross-dual dynamics. The economy gravitates toward an asymptotically stable equilibrium in which natural prices are proportional to labor-values. To demonstrate an application of the model we reply to Mirowski's (1989) critique that Marx held a contradictory 'substance' and 'field' theory of value.","PeriodicalId":129015,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Marxian; Sraffian; Institutional; Evolutionary (Topic)","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115761366","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Detecting Ponzi Finance: An Evolutionary Approach to the Measure of Financial Fragility","authors":"Éric Tymoigne","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1632893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1632893","url":null,"abstract":"Different frameworks of analysis lead to different conceptions of financial instability and financial fragility. On one side, the static approach conceptualizes financial instability as an unfortunate byproduct of capitalism that results from unpredictable random forces that no one can do anything about except prepare for through adequate loss reserves, capital, and liquidation buffers. On the other side, the evolutionary approach conceptualizes financial instability as something that the current economic system invariably brings upon itself through internal market and nonmarket forces, and that requires change in financial practices rather than merely good financial buffers. This paper compares the two approaches in order to lay the foundation for the empirical analysis developed within the evolutionary approach. The paper shows that, with the use of macroeconomic data, it is possible to detect financial fragility, especially Ponzi finance. The methodology is applied to residential housing in the U.S. household sector and is able to capture some of the trends that are known to be sources of economic difficulties. Notably, the paper finds that Ponzi finance was going on in the housing sector from at least 2004 to 2007, which concurs with other works based on more detailed data.","PeriodicalId":129015,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Marxian; Sraffian; Institutional; Evolutionary (Topic)","volume":"749 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133589059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}