Just a quick comment, Keith, perhaps more later.[snip]
I said:
Perfect competition is nothing more than a static theoretical device, not something that you'd find out there in the real economy.
This reminds me of the latest NetFuture newsletter (Steve Talbott)
http://www.netfuture.org/
where he does an extensive deconstruction of the limits of physical laws for predicting what hapens to us in the real world.
He points out that, in reality, Newton's ideal masses which travel forever in a straight line without change of either speed or direction (etc.) are never encountered: everything we find is in curved motion -- often, as the ancients asserted: circular (or more-or-less circular..) motion.
So just as ideal masses going on forever in straight lines end up in cats' ball of yarn coreoraphies of cuvilinear motion -- so too, as you say, the condition for monopoly (circular motion) is perfect competition (straight-line motion).
The ancients were unable to penetrate the circles to find the straight lines "underlying"; we are unable to penetrate real economic conditions to find the perfect competition "underlying", and, for all practical purposes, neither of us is/was the worse for it.
But the modern person who believes objects really do move in straight lines forever, just like the modern person who beleves in perfect competition, has a grossly distorted view of their environment.
Eppur si muove.
(--Galileo, which was perhaps more a political than
a physics statement).\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
