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From:
[log in to unmask] (James C.W. Ahiakpor)
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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