Co-state variables...

James Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu
Thu May 14 08:25:07 PDT 1998


One of my messages ended with the tag line:
><< "A society is rich when material goods, including capital, are cheap, and
> human beings dear." -- R.H. Tawney. >>

Dan Lazare writes:
>Hmm. This perfectly describes early-19th-century US -- if you overlook the
>human beings held as chattel slaves in the South or those slated for
>extermination in West....

right. Tawney's utopian vision (at least as implied by the quote) is too simplistic, since it emphasizes the issue of scarcity and not social relations (of production, etc.) However, I like to emphasize that what economics should be serving is _people_ rather than capital.

BTW, hearing about the NZlander who (almost) wants to renounce his or her citizenship reminds me that Albert Einstein renounced his German citizenship when he was young (long before the Nazis came to power) and was stateless for several years. (The lecture from which this was gleaned was defending the hypothesis that Einstein had autism, while his voluntary statelessness was seen as evidence for that view.)

in lbo-talkicity,

Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they really do not refer to reality." -- Albert Einstein.



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