Relative, yes, but distant relative...
>As you surely know--being an economics professor--the formation of this
>question over how to calculate the increase of exchange value led Marx to
>reorganize the structure of *Capital*. Today there are a set of Marxists
>who have undertaken conceptual and empirical work--Fred Moseley, Anwar
>Shaikh and Ahmet Tonak, Paul Cockshott and Allin Cotrill, Alan Freeman,
>Guglielmo Carchedi and the contributors to Quantitative Marxism, ed. Dunn.
>I am only now beginning to understand the importance of their efforts.
>Cutting through the price data to value magnitudes is tedious, though not
>Platonic, work.
>
I agree that this project ought to have been undertaken a century ago--that there are insights to be gained from a labor-value perspective on production and exchange. But it has always seemed to me that the assumption of a constant rate of surplus-value is simply wrong, and leads such analyses astray...
Brad DeLong