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Date: | Wed Dec 27 08:48:58 2006 |
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Mason Gaffney wrote: "J.B. Clark ... ignored Karl Marx and instead
attacked the Austrian anti-Marxist Boehm-Bawerk. Knight followed suit.
Clark and Knight both found the idea that capital has a period of
production (i.e. turns over) more threatening than they found Marx. I
continue to hope that historians of economic thought will make this
point more central to their understanding of the origins and evolution
of what today we call neo-classical economics."
I would suggest that Gaffney read carefully Clark's 1890s criticism of
Bohm-Bawerk's criticism of classical capital theory of interest and
Knight's 1930s debates with F.A. Hayek over the concept of capital
again. He would find that it was Bohm-Bawerk's and Hayek's fixation on
"capital" to mean capital goods only that drew the criticisms. The
classics and their "faithful" followers understood capital in the theory
of interest as funds, not capital goods. And as Knight pointed out to
Hayek, "capital" as "funds" comes out of savings from income, it does
not take time to create as capital goods do. The problem was one of
language, which the Austrians needed to make a greater effort to
understand, as the speakers of that language intended it.
James Ahiakpor
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