At 10:26 AM 05/17/2001 -0300, you wrote:
> > Ricardo wrote:
> > >I did not say we can't compare rice per hectare and wheat per
> > >hectare. We naturally can since these are both measures of land
> > >productivity.
>
>Jim
> > naturally? I'm sorry, but you can't do it. Comparing rice per hectare
> > to wheat per hectare isn't just like comparing apples per hectare to
> > oranges per hectare, it's like comparing air pressure and temperature.
> > They are in different units. One can't even really compare output of
> > seeds/input of seeds across crops to get a measure of relative
> > productivity of different agricultural systems because different crops
> > have different "natural" ratios of output to input of seeds.
>
>Such comparisons have been made many times as we saw in the
>passages I posted from Braudel.
I'm sorry, but in economics (or any other field that at least tries to be
scientific), just because something has been done "many times" doesn't mean
that we should do it. Just because many economists often assume that
markets are perfectly competitive doesn't mean that we should do it. As my
Mom used to say, if everyone else is jumping off a cliff, does that mean
you should do it?
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
