I suspect that Doug Henwood is not entirely comfortable with this thread that threatens to look like a refugee from OPE-L, a closed list run by someone Doug doesn't particularly like (and which I've been kept off of because of being a white male American nonlinear Post Keynesian (allegedly (eeeek!!)).
Anyway, I note that Ian Steedman's _Marx After Sraffa_ used the Sraffa critique to attack the standard interpretation of the Marxian LTV. In response to that there have been a variety of efforts by people such as Dumenil, Alain Liepitz, Duncan Foley, Antonio Callari, Alan Freeman and Guglielmo Carchedi (and their authors, including Andrew Kliman), and some others to develop an internally consistent Marxian LTV. Without going into the details (which would give Dough apoplexy), I note that this involves both reintroducing money in a more central way and also explicitly introducing dynamics. There are disagreements among those attempting this, which I presume are fought out on OPE-L, to whose archives I, like evcrybody else, remain non-privy too.
In terms of empirical tests, obviously one has to be very clear about just which version/interpretation of the LTV one is testing before one attempts to draw any conclusions. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 13 Aug 1998 08:57:49 -0700 Paul Henry Rosenberg <rad at gte.net> wrote:
> michael perelman wrote:
>
> > James Baird wrote:
> >
> > > has there ever been a serious attempt to refute
> > > Marxian economics by a "mainstream" economist?
> >
> > Certainly not a serious attempt. A few, such as Michio Morishima, have
> > attempted to show how Marx can be recast into mathematical formulae and thus
> > appear to be respectable. Paul Samuelson has attempted to refute Marx, but
> > in a clumsy and not very effective way. You just set up a straw man and
> > knock it down.
> >
> > Mostly the refutations consist of denying the labor theory of value by
> > asserting that capital is productive. Probably the most serious efforts
> > came from the Austrian school, Bohm Bawerk and Hayek.
>
> What about the reverse?
>
> Saffra's work on reswitching & its implications?
>
> I had the impression this left the LTV looking much better than the
> neo-classical alternative.
>
> With all the economists on this list, maybe I can finally get
> enlightened on this.
>
> --
> Paul Rosenberg
> Reason and Democracy
> rad at gte.net
>
> "Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu