Abstract
There’s a famous Sherlock Holmes story in which the clue is the dog that didn’t bark. The history of economic thought presents us with a similar clue — in the multiplier that wasn’t there, in the work of Ricardo and Marx and, indeed, other 19th century economists. Why, when they developed many analytically more difficult ideas, did they fail to develop the multiplier? In the case of Ricardo and Marx, the problem is particularly striking, since the direct and indirect labor embodied in a good is the employment multiplier for that good, and the set of labor values for the economy as a whole is the matrix employment multiplier for the economy. Why, when they developed the theory of labor values, did Ricardo and Marx not take the further step of defining the employment multiplier?
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© 1992 Joseph Halevi, David Laibman and Edward J. Nell
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Nell, E.J. (1992). Transformational Growth: Mass Production and the Multiplier. In: Beyond the Steady State. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10950-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10950-0_6
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