Labour Values, Prices of Production and Wage Rate of Profit Curves in Actual Economies

Lefteris Tsoulfidis () and Persefoni Tsaliki

Chapter Chapter 4 in Classical Political Economics and Modern Capitalism, 2019, pp 133-195 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In a preparatory step, we start off with the explanatory power and significance of the classical theory of value, and we argue that market prices are in fact attracted to labour values and to prices of production as more concrete centres of gravitation. For this, we utilize detailed data starting from the US economy and include a number of countries and studies; we show that the classical theory of value contains explanatory power that cannot be ignored. We further discuss related issues of technological change, as this is reflected in the rising capital-intensity of industries and falling unit labour values and questions related to the effect of distribution changes on relative prices. This finding is particularly useful in the discussions of the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit and lends support to Marx’s view that technological change is capital using-labour saving in the long run. Furthermore, the results from detailed input-output tables of the US economy ascertain the Ricardian and Marxian views expounded in Chaps. 1 and 3 , that is, the movement of prices as a consequence of changes in distribution is monotonic.

Keywords: Price-value deviations; Technological change; Unit labour values; Wage-rate of profit curves; US economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-17967-0_4

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-17967-0_4

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