Jurriaan If e.g. you believed in the "iron theory of value", and you are faced with the observation that for each industry the variability in output values does not correlate positively with iron inputs, you could also argue that a positive correlation does nevertheless exist, but it is observed only we aggregate the data of several different industries. That is, our ability to establish a positive correlation or not may partly depend on how we decide to group and aggregate the observations. The correlation may not exist at one level, or from one angle, but we may be able to demonstrate it at another level or from another angle.
------------------- Paul In principle yes, but hid Rhodus hic salta, if one thinks that this is the case demonstrate it! The only person who has taken up the challenge is Soklis who claims that all value bases are about equally good. But his method of doing it includes the 'household sector' as an industry which produces labour. He thus sneaks the labour input in via the back door when computing the iron values since the net final output of iron largely goes into final consumption, thus his iron content of labour is a pretty good proxy for the labour input, and when he is computing iron values he is really computing joint iron and labour values. If one computes iron values but eliminates the household sector, and computes labour values eliminating the iron sector, you find that labour values retain a high correlation in the absence of iron, but that iron values do not retain a high correlation in the absence of labour. ---- Jurriaan The thoughts and desires of the Goddess could be considered a Bhaskarian "hidden causal mechanism" - the metaphorical expression of divine inclinations could be thought of as denoting a complex of causal influences about which we could build a model. Paul ----- Yes they may be so considered, and religious people no doubt assign to their favourite goddesses and gods just this sort of causual mechanism. But if a mechanism is so well hidden that there is no prossible method of revealing it then for scientists, as opposed to priests, that mechanism should be disregarded. This is the substance of Smolins criticism of string theory which, I think can equally be applied to Marginal Utility theory: it is a sophisticated maths of causes that are so well hidden that they are not even in principle testable. The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
