Lakshmi Rhone wrote:
> I could use your help in explaining exactly how and why it is the target
> often moves faster than the adjustments.
Joan Robinson discussed this point at some length. You might want to see
her:
The Accumulation of Capital
Chapter 6 The meaning of equilibrium, pp. 57-60
Chapter 19 Prices and profits, pp. 179-192
Chapter 34 Supply and demand, pp. 351-363;
especially, pp.352&353 "Normal Prices"
"Lecture delivered at Oxford by a Cambridge Economist" [1953], in
Collected Economic Papers, Volume IV, 1973, Ch. 27.
"History versus Equilibrium" in Contributions to Modern Economics,(1978,
Ch. 12),
Lakshmi Rhone wrote:
> May I have the page numbers for that? Marx argues that there is a tendency
> for an equalization of the profit rate over the short, medium or long term--he
> does not really specify. But even as he is showing the consequences of that
> process
> he at the time emphasizes the continuous reduction in unit values due to what
> economists call shifts in the supply curve.
Marx has much to say about supply and demand, market price and value in
"Value, Price, and Profit." He even approvingly quotes Adam Smith
passage on market prices gravitating toward natural prices. In addition
Engels discusses relationship between price and value in his Preface to
The Poverty of Philosophy. A couple of representative passages follow:
Supply and demand regulate nothing but the temporary fluctuations of
market prices. They will explain to you why the market price of a
commodity rises above or sinks below its value, but they can never
account for the value itself. Suppose supply and demand to equilibrate,
or, as the economists call it, to cover each other. Why, the very moment
these opposite forces become equal they paralyze each other, and cease
to work in the one or other direction. At the moment when supply and
demand equilibrate each other, and therefore cease to act, the market
price of a commodity coincides with its real value, with the standard
price round which its market prices oscillate.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch01.htm#c4
The value of commodities is determined by the labour required for their
production. But now it turns out that in this imperfect world
commodities are sold sometimes above, sometimes below their value, and
indeed not only as a result of ups and downs in competition. The rate of
profit tends just as much to balance out at the same level for all
capitalists as the price of commodities does to become reduced to the
labour value by agency of supply and demand.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/pre-1885.htm
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
