Max Sawicky Quotes Herb Gintis

Herb Gintis says:

MaxSpeak, You Listen!: QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN HERB: Sam [Bowles] and spent several years trying to shore up Marx's labor theory of value. We called it "Sites and Practices," and we tried to make it work. Alfredo Medio, who made the labor theory of value an analytical device, inspired much of our work on this topic, But... [quoting Geoff Hodgson] 'After you make the labor theory of value look pretty and work it out so that it is intellectually credible, you no longer have the labor theory of value, but something quite different. So, why call it the labor theory of value?'

Comments

[andres]

I have to admit that the thought of Herb Gintis being chairman of anything is humorous in and of itself ;-)

However, Geoff Hodgson does have a point in that modern economists understand the "value" of a goodto be the same thing as its relative price compared to other commodities, and once you work through all the gymnastics of the tranformation problem, it becomes clear that the labor theory doesn't work as a theory of relative prices, ie it's _not_ a competing alternative to neoclassical price theory.

It is much more accurate, imo, to talk about a "Labor Theory of Value-Added and Exploitation". The transformation problem, in fact, is an attempt to make the Labor Theory of Value Added and Exploitation compatible with only one small aspect of price theory--the tendency of profit rates to equalize across industries.

In effect, economists who say that Marx's economics don't work because the labor theory of value doesn't work as a theory of price are knocking down a straw man. Marxian political economy is not "founded" on price theory in the way that modern economic theory is "founded" on macroeconomics. People who wish to be true social scientists as opposed to narrow financial technicians need to get away from such determinism.

[andres]

Oops. The next-to-last sentence should read microeconomics, not macroeconomics. "Macrofoundations" of economics is another can of worms entirely ;-)

[Chip Poirot]

Then again, once you get the marginal value of theory worked out in a way that is intellectually credible, you really don't have a marginal theory of value. So why bother?

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Why Marx's Labor theory of Value? Didn't Adam Smith come up with it first? (WoN I,V. para 1)

[Eli Rabett]

Max's theory of value is that kos sucks

[Sandwichman]

That was a Barkley Rosser post, not Max's.