tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post6557792507150064871..comments2024-03-29T03:19:09.227-04:00Comments on The Philosopher's Stone: BACK TO SERIOUS STUFFRobert Paul Wolffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-1009017640620435472013-01-23T08:17:34.916-05:002013-01-23T08:17:34.916-05:00Wallyverr, I actually saw that review [the only on...Wallyverr, I actually saw that review [the only one, I think] and sent him a thank you note. It warmed my heart. Perhaps one good review is worth a thousand mentions. Since I care more about writing well than just about anything else, the review really touched me.Robert Paul Wolffhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-70177315836466295792013-01-23T05:25:31.652-05:002013-01-23T05:25:31.652-05:00Not completely unread and unreviewed. The unique ...Not completely unread and unreviewed. The unique and unclassifiable George Scialabba wrote an 800-word review, originally published in the Village Voice Literary Supplement and available on his website: <br />www.georgescialabba.net/mtgs/1988/06/moneybags-must-be-so-lucky-on.html <br /><br />His closing paragraph starts: <br />"Wolff is a Marxist and an academic philosopher yet he also has a sense of humor and can write. The improbability of all these things being true of the same person is incalculable."wallyverrhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18358344785499490511noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-20647247238349246222013-01-14T22:18:59.017-05:002013-01-14T22:18:59.017-05:00Magpie-
All of the classical economists considere...Magpie-<br /><br />All of the classical economists considered rent and profits to be fundamentally different kinds of income streams, and treated them differently. Because landlords and capitalists were, at the time, two distinct classes vying for political power, economists cared which class benefited more from any given measure. The thesis that over time, profit would disappear and all the surplus would go to rent was widely shared (more recently, Schumpeter and Keynes both worried along these lines as well).<br /><br />Marx also treats profits and rents separately (rents don't enter the picture until volume 3 of Capital). He presents rent as a diversion, or "transformation", of a portion of the surplus value produced. However, he also notes that over time, land and capital become "fused" -- capitalists make enough money to buy up landed estates, and so the revenue streams become joined.Willhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14943136764424893492noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-32780453643676474642013-01-13T06:45:46.157-05:002013-01-13T06:45:46.157-05:00I am a bit distracted, because my wife fell while ...I am a bit distracted, because my wife fell while on a walk and fractured her shoulder, which in a womn about to turn eighty is rather serious. It is all I can do to keep things afloat and post this material. <br /><br />briefly, the odd thing about general equilibrium theories isw that there is no profit, as opposed to a rate of interest. Competition reduces the profitr rate to zero. This is, mathematically, exactly the same case as that in which Ruler's theorem about linear homogeneous functions applies, which is to say it is equivalent to the case in which labor and capital are paid their marginal product. Long story.<br /><br />Kenneth, I do not know,. I have not written it, ave in many different pieces that have appeared here and there. It wojuld be an enormous undertaking to wrote anlother book, and I cannot imagine anyone would want to read it [except for you, maybe. :) ]Robert Paul Wolffhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-29331673107389387222013-01-13T03:24:50.937-05:002013-01-13T03:24:50.937-05:00As someone who has read your book Moneybags, when ...As someone who has read your book Moneybags, when do you plan to release the substance of Part 3?Kenneth Tionghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03968170955598208470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-55718478533797184562013-01-12T22:03:43.415-05:002013-01-12T22:03:43.415-05:00(Sorry for posting and deleting, but there was a &...(Sorry for posting and deleting, but there was a "stubborn" typo or the comment was too long)<br /><br />I'm looking forward to this series of articles. I find the way Prof. Wolff combines serious stuff with everyday stuff captivating.<br /><br />"I argued that Nozick and Rawls used the formalism of Game Theory to lend an air of objectivity to what were, in both cases, unacknowledged and inadequately defended normative presuppositions."<br /><br />I think I know what you mean. I myself I'm currently reading a lot and in the process I stumbled upon a very interesting article from the defunct History of Economic Thought website (one can find it at the Internet Archive, and there are several copies floating around on the net).<br /><br />The article is entitled "Cantillon's Land Theory of Value", which is supposedly a rendition, in simple mathematical form, of the doctrines of Cantillon.<br /><br />It states: "In this long-run, Cantillon is careful to note that there will naturally have to also be no profits. His time horizon is long enough that firms will be created and enter and exit production so as to wipe out any profit opportunities."<br /><br />A few lines later, it presents the following two equations:<br /><br />p[N]*X[N] = w*L[N] + t*T[N]<br /><br />p[U]*X[U] = w*L[U] + t*T[U]<br /><br />The brackets denote subindexes. <br /><br />In the LHS, p are prices, subindexes are N is for workers' consumption goods and U for landowners' consumption goods; X are physical quantities of each class of consumption good.<br /><br />In the RHS, L are counts of workers; the w are individual workers' wages, t is rent per area, T is the agricultural land surface.<br /><br />One can see that there is no term labelled "profit" in those equations. Therefore, for Cantillon (and presumably the author of the article), there is no profit.<br /><br />But reading the article (or even paying attention to what the 2 equations above show) one sees that workers, well, do all the work. At the other hand, other than renting their property and consuming the surplus of what the agricultural workers produce, the landowners do nothing. <br /><br />If the angel of the Lord came and exterminated the landowners as he supposedly did with the firstborn of the Egyptians, nobody would notice anything, except that now workers would have much more to consume.<br /><br />How come there is no profit? Cantillon, at least as rendered in this article, creates a distinction between profits and rents. But that distinction is never justified in the text and possibly in Cantillon's mind. <br /><br />From a Marxist perspective, this distinction is an artificial one.<br /><br />An opposer to Marx's thought could retort that this is problem only for a Marxist. But in this case she would need to acknowledge that at least Marxists have an explicit argument to object the distinction profit/rent.<br /><br />Cantillon, as rendered in the article, offers no argument to distinguish rent from profit.<br />Magpiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07528637318288802178noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-3384910756720749782013-01-12T21:50:18.759-05:002013-01-12T21:50:18.759-05:00This comment has been removed by the author.Magpiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07528637318288802178noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-61554089482919484622013-01-12T21:44:03.297-05:002013-01-12T21:44:03.297-05:00This comment has been removed by the author.Magpiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07528637318288802178noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-61585796610095308312013-01-12T21:26:07.939-05:002013-01-12T21:26:07.939-05:00This comment has been removed by the author.Magpiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07528637318288802178noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-71051073356609376482013-01-12T13:44:30.852-05:002013-01-12T13:44:30.852-05:00Is the proposition "there is no social realit...Is the proposition "there is no social reality that is objective, value-neutral, and independent of our ideological representations" itself ideological, or does it entail the thesis of the existence of a non-social reality?Don Schneierhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12751277350617015241noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-33644605941220559452013-01-12T13:39:20.184-05:002013-01-12T13:39:20.184-05:00This comment has been removed by the author.Don Schneierhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12751277350617015241noreply@blogger.com