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Societies for the History of Economics

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From:
[log in to unmask] (J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.)
Date:
Fri Mar 31 17:18:34 2006
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----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 
 
Oh my, what a rat's nest.  I don't have a candidate for greatest  
economist, but do have remarks on Marx. He was indeed right  
about some things, even directly, quite aside from fussing about  
trends.  One was the tendency to a greater concentration of  
capital.  This certainly did occur in most of the advanced capitalist  
world during the latter part of the nineteenth century. That antitrust  
in the US or entry in new industries elsewhere offset this in the  
twentieth century does not take away from his pretty good several  
decades' forecast.    
 
He invented the formal two-sector growth model, although most  
using those conveniently forget this.   
 
Although he did not see that it would lead to increasing wages, he  
also was much more of a prophet of technological change than any  
economist prior to him that I am aware of.  And he clearly  
understood that this ongoing technological change could and  
probably would have revolutionary implications for social and  
political relations in societies experiencing them, even if he did not  
accurately forecast the nature of all of those changes.   
 
Barkley Rosser 
James Madison University 
 
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