Ted wrote: > Substitute whatever is the current formalized representation > of the "good" individuals are assumed to desire. What I > requested was an explanation of how it can be used to > represent the particular conception of this "good" found in > Marx.
How? This is how: You decide the end ex hypothesi. It's as simple as this: Let x be a variable. Now x can be the stature of children in New Hampshire, the income of households in New Zealand, or the number of angels fitting in the head of a pin. You decide ex hypothesi what x is. Think of x as the entire framework of this formalization: You fill it out with the content that you stipulate. Of course, the reason why you may be using this framework is because you want to explore some interesting problem whose solution is not obvious or trivial to you. You have a set of choice variables -- the levels of some actions or what have you (e.g. levels of production or consumption of goods). You specify an end function, in which some measure of your end depends on the level of the choice variables. Usually, you'll need to impose restrictions (e.g. production possibilities, given prices, or some other conditions not subject to alteration *within the problem*), and you need the restrictions to allow for some degrees of freedom, otherwise there's no real choice. This is definitely not a trivial thing, especially when you make the context more "realistic" (e.g. dynamic, with some uncertainty, endogenous interactions with other agents, etc.). Now, let me turn the question around: What in Marx's definition of the end would make allocation of productive forces under communism so un-amenable to this formalization? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
