From Robert’s list of papers which study the empirical relevance of re-switching and capital reversing I’ve been able to find only a few that are available on line.

The Han and Schefold paper (abstract here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1096805)
is the one I referred to above. I said it was 5% of the time. Actually they find it 3.65% of cases.

The Zambelli paper (abstract here:
http://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v28y2004i1p99-120.html)
is a numerical simulation which looks at the probability that an aggregate production function can ‘emerge’ from an underlying micro structure. The author states in the abstract that: “The conclusion is that there exists a world of significant size for which the aggregate neoclassical theory of production does not hold.”
Which we already knew from the theory. It’s impossible to say what the size of this world actually is since there is no access to the paper.

At this point I should mention that the non existence of an aggregate production function is no guarantee of existence of re-switching and capital reversing. In fact, it’s trivial to construct linear production models where everything works just like in the neoclassical model. In fact, other work in the similar line (computer generated simulations used to asses the likelihood that something that could happen actually happens) has found that the likelihood of reswitching and capital reversing to be very low (I need to look the cite up). So in the end, maybe aggregate production functions don’t exist, but factor demand curves still slope downward.

Likewise there’s no access to the Price and Rosser paper (it might be on Barkley’s site and I might have missed it) but reading it’s title and the relevant discussion on the PKT list, it appears to me that Robert is severely stretching the relevancy of that paper to the present issue (what is the empirical evidence that factor demand curves don’t always slope down). First, the paper is more about environmental valuations of costs and benefits and second, the paper is about “reswitching like” effects, not actual reswitching effects.

I feel like I should be able to find the Albin paper since, I believe, that one is a more cited one. But the Gods of Google were not cooperative.

So I’m still gonna go with my prior that there isn’t much evidence that re-switching and capital reversing are prevalent, or even sort-of-common in the real world.

Oh my God! Get over it. I didn’t even notice the smiley you petty schmuck and you can’t blame me for taking that statement at face value given your general attitude.

“I don’t see anything cryptic about my remarks at all(at least, “this paper simply isn’t science, not no way, not no how””

What makes it “not science”? You basically proved that assertion with nothing but a condescending sigh.

“‘Assassination a random variable? Looks good to me’ was definitely a jaw-dropper”

Arghghg. Assassination is not a random variable. The success of an assassination attempt can possibly be modeled as a random variable. Success, failure. You know, Bernoulli.

“asking you to justify your statements”

That’s not what you did. Instead you started talking about “hints” and “students”. In other words typical asshole passive aggressive power play where you set yourself up as the authority whose wisdom we all have to figure out by guessing his mind. Gimme a break.

I must say that behavioural economics seems to me to be an absolute paradigm case of a research program that isn’t going anywhere.

There’s some truth to this. But bear in mind, just getting mainstream economists to acknowledge that, even in situations where behaving rationally is universally acknowledged to be the optimal strategy, people still don’t behave as they ‘should’, and in systemic, nonrandom ways, is a big step forward.

Speaking just for myself, I’d like to get a lot of math out of economics, to make it more respectable. I agree with emerson’s #179, btw, though I think that the proper science to equate economics to is not astrology/astonomy, but alchemy. Bear in mind that however crackpot their theories were, those old guys did manage to accumulate a rather large body of very practical lore; they knew how to get certain things done, even if they didn’t know precisely why they worked. And that’s(imho) the state economics is in these days. Recall that no less a luminary than von Neumann once opined that on the subject of economics, we don’t even know the right questions ask yet, let alone what the fundamental entities are, that we’re thinking in terms of phlogiston and caloric, rather than work and energy.

So by all means, hit the big problems from all sides, even if they appear to stop producing results.

Deliberately cutting off a smiley for chrissakes? Do you key people’s cars too, if you think they’ve taken ‘your’ parking space?

I’ve been around awhile, and I’ve seen some pretty odious cut-and-pastes; but this is a new low for sheer pointless spite.

What in God’s name were you thinking? What could possibly justify such behaviour?

You, on the other hand, started off this whole thing with a smug, condescending attitude, part of which consisted of being cryptic and playing the role of, I don’t know, a game show host chastising an inadequate contestant.

Er, no. I was quite clear: papers such as the one described show a lack of understanding of statistics, and really aren’t ‘scientific’ by any stretch of the imagination. Likewise, to defend such work is also indicative of a lack of understanding of the basic principles of statistics. These really aren’t debatable points. Looking back over what I wrote, I don’t see anything cryptic about my remarks at all(at least, “this paper simply isn’t science, not no way, not no how”, to quote myself, doesn’t strike me as being particularly cryptic.) Nor was it by the remotest stretch condescending; asking you to justify your statements when you argue by telling (‘Assassination a random variable? Looks good to me’ was definitely a jaw-dropper) instead of showing is most definitely not condescension. You shouldn’t have to be prodded into doing this, btw. It’s something most people take for granted that they have to do.

And SoV, I really don’t know what else to say to you except that you’re basically parading your ignorance here, like many other people, a mathematics degree or not. Economic theories are confronted with data all the time. When they fail, people look for where problem is. Sometimes the problem is with the noisy data, sometimes it’s with the theory but one way or another the data or the theory get refined and the process continues. Likewise, many economic theory actually yield ambiguous results – an obvious example, does labor supply increase or decrease when the wage goes up – which necessitates the estimation of “facts on the ground”. Simply speaking, you have no idea of what you’re talking about.

Sigh. Is argument by (vague)assertion all you’ve got?

You’ve been rude(extremely so,in my book), but have no problem accusing others of rudeness after you’ve initiated it. You’ve made some extremely ignorant statements, and many, many vague ones.

You apparently have little, if any, statistical training, and refuse to answer arguments about that subject, concise arguments backed up with quotes, preferring instead to be nasty.

You’ve been condescending, and from what I can tell you don’t have much of anything to be condescending. When people take the trouble to post material that shows that you are baldly, spectacularly wrong, you refuse to admit it.

In short, you’ve been behaving like a wanker of the first kind and a poster example of why economists don’t get a lot of respect, their assumption of airs to the contrary. But this:

“I’m a mathematician. You’re an economist. In any sort of comparison as to who falls where in the intellectual hierarchy, I win automatically, hands down, not even a contes”

No. It depends on the topic we’re discussing. I know plenty of mathematicians (and trust me, I know plenty of’em) who don’t know a first thing about many topics outside of their specialization. Nothing wrong with that, except when they get on blog threads and act all high and mighty on a topic they haven’t got a clue in.

This is just petty and despicable. You know damn well that I put a smiley on that, so that the quote ends “. . . not even a contest :-)”. It was a tongue-in-cheek comment, made to be taken as a joke. You deliberately, with malice and spite aforethought, removed that bit of nuance to make it seem as if I was being some sort of ponce.

I have no idea why you are the way you are, and I can’t conceive of anything that would explain or mitigate your behaviour.

In my brief interactions with you, you’ve made a couple of things quite, quite clear: your ignorance is so abysmal that it should be properly be called ignirntz. And you’re a very small and unpleasant man, in addition to showing every symptom of being a systemic incompetent. With your defects of ability and character, you have no business being in academia, if in fact you really are.

But I don’t see the point to asking for empirical work confirming a demonstration that mainstream textbook economics is logically invalid. I lean towards John Emerson’s view on the exposure of orthodox economics, whether or not you are aware of the existence of alternatives.

Leontief’s input-output analysis is empirical work I think closely related to Sraffa’s theory. This is built into how nations present national income statistics.

(I could stand to learn more about the work of Thomas K. Rymes.)

I don’t find it telling, except for the sociology of economics, whether or not some economists signing the minimum wage cite the CCC. Many probably don’t mention Frank Hahn’s view on General Equilibrium either. But it’s an elementary fallacy to think popularity is an argument. Also, I don’t expect many citations of my Manchester School paper.

If you want to see connections drawn between the CCC and arguments over labor market flexibility, you could do worse than Graham White’s “The Poverty of Conventional Economic Wisdom and the Search for Alternative Economic and Social Policies”. (I mentioned that paper more than a year ago.)

I don’t expect to be able to keep up with comments and posts here.

He and I are talking about different things and both could be right. His focus was on a specific point, and mine was about the general question of how orthodoxy responds to heterodox criticism.

Lemuel, depressed: I think that some of the heterodox criticisms are pretty fundamental, not just a matter of political bias. Later.

“One thing I come up with fairly often in marginalist apologetics is “The heterodox economists make a lot of criticisms, but have failed to come up with a better theory”.

This is a pretty fundamental error. If you point out that someone has failed to square the circle, it’s not up to you to find a successful way of squaring the circle. ”

SoV:

“Well, you do what you can with what you got; that’s what statistics is all about, practically speaking.”

Now you guys argue.

(also, you can take the Behavioral Economics peoples as an example of how it should be done. They identified a problem with standard theory, painstakingly documented the pervasiveness of this problem(s) in the real world and then worked very hard to built a viable and useful alternative theory. And in so doing they found that they were, once again, “building upon” rather than “overthrowing” existing theory)

And SoV, I really don’t know what else to say to you except that you’re basically parading your ignorance here, like many other people, a mathematics degree or not. Economic theories are confronted with data all the time. When they fail, people look for where problem is. Sometimes the problem is with the noisy data, sometimes it’s with the theory but one way or another the data or the theory get refined and the process continues. Likewise, many economic theory actually yield ambiguous results – an obvious example, does labor supply increase or decrease when the wage goes up – which necessitates the estimation of “facts on the ground”. Simply speaking, you have no idea of what you’re talking about.

“I’m a mathematician. You’re an economist. In any sort of comparison as to who falls where in the intellectual hierarchy, I win automatically, hands down, not even a contes”

No. It depends on the topic we’re discussing. I know plenty of mathematicians (and trust me, I know plenty of’em) who don’t know a first thing about many topics outside of their specialization. Nothing wrong with that, except when they get on blog threads and act all high and mighty on a topic they haven’t got a clue in.

So? You can get all the weird stuff with regular production functions, as Robert’s pointed out before. You don’t have to assume linear production structure, so flat segment or not is irrelevant.

“there’s also a huge industry called “management consultancy” which is based on the fact that nearly every producing unit nearly every industry in the world isn’t operating on the efficient frontier.”

Sure, but that’s different than reswitching. You’re trying to pull a sleight-of-hand here. Before you were obviously talking about CCC, now you’re talking about something else.

“a lot of extremely interesting empirical work gets produced in heterodox economics and just to prove it, they publish it in Metroeconomica, the JPKE, the CJE and so on.”

I’m sure this is true in general. But not on this topic. Where are the empirical papers which document the pervasiveness of reswitching and capital reversing in the real world?

For one thing, it’s telling that NOT ONE of those hundred+ economists who signed the letter in support of the higher minimum wage mentioned CCC related phenomenon as the reason for their support. They mentioned equality, social justice, etc. but not this.

I think depressed is saying (and I would agree) that this is not an appropriate analogy. Economics is not astrology, it’s just bad, dishonest astronomy. There’s no unbridgeable methodological gap between “mainstream” economics and the various heterodox approaches. And the reason Mankiw fails to tell us anything useful about the world, while Krugman (or Dani Rodrik or Dean Baker or…) does, is simply that Mankiw is a dishonest hack and they are not.