To Allin Cottrell: If these are not dealt with in the main
message, they should be saved for an epilogue response.
1) Normality of price dispersion presented in Farjoun and
Machover is NOT a trivial assumption. Most asset prices (at
least) have both seriously skewed and leptokurtotic distributions.
Response?
2) It may be that one can argue that labor is "primary" because
we are the source of use-value (and in neoclassical terms of demand).
Things are produced for us (Smith's quote, btw, is only relevant
if average wages are the same. How long _I_ have to work to purchase
something may have little to do with how much labor-time, of
whatever sort however measured, went into producing it).
But "primaryness" ultimately resides in land (and more generally
the biosphere/ecosystem). Without land there cannot be labor because
of the food requirement for subsistence (and I don't want to hear
about hi-tech hydroponics fantasies of landless food production!).
Of course without labor there can be no capital, but land is primary.
Why not a physiocratic land theory of value (the energeticist/
thermodynamicists might leap in here too)?
Barkley Rosser
James Madison University
