Fred Guy writes:>Steedman tried the same thing with efficiency wage theory a couple of years back, in Metroeconomica, exchanging shots with both Herb Gintis and Peter Skott. Steedman doesn't like functions that treat things we can't measure, like effort and knowledge, as variables with cardinal orderings. The substance of the paper below is his repeated contention that this practice doesn't make sense.<
Steedman is following the hard-core empiricist tradition? (Even behaviorist psychologists sometimes accept the role of unmeasured or unmeasureable "intervening variables" and so reject this kind of empiricism.) Doesn't he come from the Cambridge (U.K.) growth theory vision? A lot of the stuff in that school's growth theory can't be measured, either. The idea that the economy is on a wage/profit curve is a theoretical, not an empirical, one, since each point on the curve is a steady-state equilibrium (i.e., unreal). Mat F. writes: > Haven't seen the Steedman paper yet, but there are a number of papers by Heinz Kurz and Kurz and Salvadori that are pretty devastating critiques of 'new' growth theories. One is called "Old Wine in New Goatskins".< Didn't Moses Abramowitz have an article in the prestigious JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES (edited by pen-l alumnus, Brad de Long, though maybe not at that time) about new growth theory which included "old wine in new bottles" in its title? Abramowitz is an old-fashioned neoclassical. > On efficiency wages as an explanation of wage differentials by race and gender, both Darity and Rhonda Williams have some pretty severe criticisms.< what are these criticisms? (It seems to me that so-called efficiency wages can only be a very small part of any theory of such wage differentials.) Jim Devine
