[lbo-talk] Delong puts the smackdown on ol' Whiskers

[Brad DeLong]

>Brad DeLong wrote:
>
>>Because I want to save an undergrad who's ODing on capital from 
>>drowning in the swamp that is the labor theory of value...
>>
>>Would you wish anybody to disappear into *that* swamp?
>
>Never, if you mean this sort of thing: 
><http://www.greenwich.ac.uk/~fa03/iwgvt2/index.html#top>. That's not 
>the most fortunate aspect of Marx's heritage. But there's so much 
>magnificent stuff in Capital that I hope you're not trying to 
>discourage your student from studying that!
>
>Doug

Yes: it's great history; it's great sociology; it's great moral philosophy.

But the formal analytical economics... the rates of surplus value and 
the organic composition of capital and the falling rate of profit and 
the transformation problem and the... and the... and the...

It's like attaching a bathtub to a bicycle.

And it weakens the book massively: economists and others who key on 
the formal analytical model quickly find that it doesn't make much 
sense, and those who strive to prove that it does, somehow, make 
sense... vanish into the swamp and are never seen again.

As someone's advisor once said, LTV has ruined more good minds than LSD...

-- 

Yours,

Brad DeLong