John Medaille's strictures apply to super-Tories like Senior or Edgeworth,  
and to pols who followed their line. He may be spreading the blame around  
too far and ignoring some more temperate contemporaries. Whether the faults  
apply to James Ahiakpor is for James to say.  
  
Please note, though, that Knut Wicksell worked out a simple model showing  
how any labor supply can be accommodated with any capital supply by changing  
the factor proportions in response to relative prices. It is irreverently,  
but mnemonically, called "The Grape Juice Model", found in Wicksell's  
*Lectures*, pp. 172 ff., and spasmodically throughout *Value, Capital, and  
Rent*. Wicksell, the "Swedish Austrian", finds the essence of substituting  
labor for capital in shortening the period of investment; then he deftly  
converts this relationship of sequence to one of coexistence simply by  
inverting the order of integration. He acknowledged the prior insights of  
Ricardo, and wisely changed the name of the "wages-fund" doctrine to the  
"wages-flow" doctrine.  
  
This dream was brought to the doorstep of Anglophone economists, but they  
just let it lie there, and die there, while they waltzed off with Keynes'  
variation on it, a variation that was finally to destroy itself in  
double-digit inflation, leaving us in the jaws of the Chicago School.   
  
It is a mystery and disappointment to me how Joan Robinson, whom I had  
regarded highly, attacked Wicksell when she might have used him  
constructively, and instead set off that silly Cambridge controversy.  
Economists played in this distracted otherwise useful people for years,  
while English and U.S. pols moved steadily into more labor-bashing while  
land and housing prices octupled.  
  
Mason Gaffney