> Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 16:36:45 +0000 > From: [email protected]
> > > Krugman's blog > at > http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/on-gattopardo-economics/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 > > > says: > "2. If you believe in, or even use, marginal productivity theory, you > are conceding that capitalists deserve their income. > > Neither of these things are true. Nothing about marginal productivity > theory depends on the exact truth of a simple aggregate production > function with capital defined by a single number. And saying that > capital gets its marginal product in no way says that the people who > own that capital deserve what they get." ============ Krugman is correct on the technical fine point with respect to the first sentence in the second paragraph; for details see Stephen Marglin's chapter 10 on marginal productivity and Marxian models in "Growth, Distribution and Prices." The problem is, there simply is no such beast as *an exact truth* of a simple aggregate production function; it fails to refer to the capital structure of a capitalist "economy" at the scale of the nation-state or the [dis]unity of global capitalism. Thus it makes no sense to say the owners get their marginal product, irrespective of any extant theory of desert. Reification and the seductions of algebra are, as leftists have known for a really long time, nothing more than obfuscations of political power the attendant legal relations. The twilight of desert is at hand. The attack on the meritocratic narrative, as Krugman indicates, needs to be deepened. The dialectics of luck and tragedy may be a more interesting venue for story telling; interested parties might consider the work of Richard Arneson and G.A. Cohen on the issue of luck, for starters. But whatever story is told; the economists must remain in control of the story! E. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
