Title:	Modern Classical Economics and Reality
Authors:	Theodore Mariolis Lefteris Tsoulfidis
Keywords:	Reality
Issue Date:	2016
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	The salient feature of this book is to show the theoretical relevance and empirical significance of the classical theory of value and income distribution formulated by the old classical economists and Karl Marx and further advanced by the writings of Piero Sraffa as well as by modern followers of the classical tradition. The classical theory includes in its explanatory dataset the real wage(s) and the state of technology, which are both measurable variables and can be obtained through the available input–output and national income accounts data. As a consequence, by using data readily available in national or international organizations, one can estimate the uniform profit rate and the competitive (‘long-period’) relative prices for actual economies. As is well-known, the classical approach had been “submerged and forgotten” since the advent of the neoclassical or marginalist theory, which was formulated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and then begins to dominate economic thinking. The explanatory dataset of the neoclassical theory includes the preferences of consumers, the size and distribution of endowment of resources amongst individual agents, and the state of technology. The neoclassical theory is also capable of determining a set of commodity (and ‘production factors’) prices; however, the subjective character of components of its dataset casts doubt about the empirical reliability of the neoclassically-determined prices as predictors of relative commodity prices and distributive variables in actual economies. This theory has also been criticized for its logical inconsistency as this has been shown for both the theory of the perfectly competitive firm as early as the 1920s and the capital theory debates that started with Joan Robinson and culminated in the 1960s. This book is structured as follows. Chapter 1 outlines the central relationships amongst classical, traditional neoclassical and modern classical theories of value, income distribution and capital. On the basis of both the latter theory and the modern, state variable representation of linear systems it also defines the basic premise of the book, that is, (i) the revelation of the essential properties of the static and dynamic behaviour of a linear production system as a whole; and, therefore, (ii) the determination of the extent to which these properties deviate from those predicted by the traditional theories.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/54225
ISBN:	978-4-431-55004-4
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

Items in DSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.