保羅·科克肖特（Paul Cockshott）是蘇格蘭格拉斯哥大學(xué)的準(zhǔn)教授、計算機專家。他們的主要研究領(lǐng)域包括數(shù)組編譯器（array compilers）、經(jīng)濟物理學(xué)（econophysics ）和可計算性（computability）的物理基礎(chǔ)等。他撰寫了一系列書籍，其中包括《走向新社會主義》（Towards a New Socialism ）和最近的《經(jīng)典經(jīng)濟物理學(xué)》（Classical Econophysics）一書。

本訪談最初發(fā)表于“矛盾的精神”（Spirit of Contradiction）網(wǎng)站。

采訪者的問題為粗體。

問：你最近在研究經(jīng)濟學(xué)力學(xué)。你可以簡單介紹一些什么是經(jīng)濟物理學(xué)，以及它如何與社會主義者相關(guān)嗎？

答：我明白，它可能看起來有點晦澀。但是你得知道，馬克思說過他打算發(fā)現(xiàn)資本主義運行的規(guī)律——這是一個深受物理學(xué)影響的觀點。什么是經(jīng)濟物理學(xué)？物理學(xué)發(fā)展了一套研究高自由度系統(tǒng)的概念裝置。經(jīng)濟物理學(xué)主要討論的就是用這一套概念裝置來理解經(jīng)濟現(xiàn)象的嘗試。因此，經(jīng)濟物理學(xué)大量借用統(tǒng)計力學(xué)（statistical mechanics）中發(fā)展起來的理念。

經(jīng)濟物理學(xué)有兩個主要的來源。數(shù)學(xué)家Farjoun 和Machover （他們在1983年出版了《混沌規(guī)律：政治經(jīng)濟學(xué)的概率論方法》<Laws of Chaos, A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy>一書，將統(tǒng)計力學(xué)的方法引入到經(jīng)濟學(xué)研究中。該書得出了價格和勞動量的關(guān)系、利潤率分布和勞動生產(chǎn)率提高的趨勢都服從概率規(guī)律的結(jié)論。反對一般利潤率的假定，認(rèn)為《資本論》第一卷的勞動價值論更符合經(jīng)濟現(xiàn)實，從而<用作者的話說>“消解”了馬克思的轉(zhuǎn)型問題。這本書被認(rèn)為是經(jīng)濟物理學(xué)的開端。——譯者注）把資本主義經(jīng)濟作為一個混沌系統(tǒng)進行研究，基于統(tǒng)計力學(xué)，將價格的出現(xiàn)歸結(jié)于勞動價值。最近，有許多物理學(xué)畢業(yè)生進入金融部門工作。他們把自己的概念背景應(yīng)用于金融業(yè)的經(jīng)濟問題。（物理學(xué)家到華爾街工作早已不是新聞，中文媒體也有報道。

由于后一種工作主要由雇主們付酬，所以傾向于聚焦金融市場，但是它創(chuàng)造了一個機會。以數(shù)學(xué)和物理學(xué)為主要學(xué)科背景的人，已經(jīng)開始不帶預(yù)先形成的意識形態(tài)來審視經(jīng)濟。如果他們獲得了經(jīng)濟學(xué)學(xué)位，就可能會有這種先入為主的意識形態(tài)。相比經(jīng)濟學(xué)家而言，這就生產(chǎn)了更多以經(jīng)驗為依據(jù)，更少基于意識形態(tài)的研究。

經(jīng)濟物理學(xué)與社會主義者的相關(guān)之處在于，你可以使用這些方法來分析資本主義，理解為什么勞動價值論站得住腳，以及為什么收入分布變得如此扭曲。

問：你可以簡單描述下你認(rèn)為在這個領(lǐng)域中已經(jīng)發(fā)現(xiàn)的重要結(jié)果嗎？

答：我覺得，重要的研究結(jié)果是：

1，勞動價值論基本上是準(zhǔn)確的。

2，任何市場制度都有一個非常不均勻的收入分布——甚至工人持股企業(yè)的制度下，也是如此。

3，然而，相對于如上考察所預(yù)期的結(jié)果，現(xiàn)存的制度收入分布更加不均勻（美國馬里蘭大學(xué)物理學(xué)教授Victor Yakovenko在一次訪談中解釋了為什么現(xiàn)實的資本主義制度收入分布更不均勻：

由于后一種工作主要由雇主們付酬，所以傾向于聚焦金融市場，但是它創(chuàng)造了一個機會。以數(shù)學(xué)和物理學(xué)為主要學(xué)科背景的人，已經(jīng)開始不帶預(yù)先形成的意識形態(tài)來審視經(jīng)濟。如果他們獲得了經(jīng)濟學(xué)學(xué)位，就可能會有這種先入為主的意識形態(tài)。相比經(jīng)濟學(xué)家而言，這就生產(chǎn)了更多以經(jīng)驗為依據(jù)，更少基于意識形態(tài)的研究。

經(jīng)濟物理學(xué)與社會主義者的相關(guān)之處在于，你可以使用這些方法來分析資本主義，理解為什么勞動價值論站得住腳，以及為什么收入分布變得如此扭曲。

問：你可以簡單描述下你認(rèn)為在這個領(lǐng)域中已經(jīng)發(fā)現(xiàn)的重要結(jié)果嗎？

答：我覺得，重要的研究結(jié)果是：

1，勞動價值論基本上是準(zhǔn)確的。

2，任何市場制度都有一個非常不均勻的收入分布——甚至工人持股企業(yè)的制度下，也是如此。

3，然而，相對于如上考察所預(yù)期的結(jié)果，現(xiàn)存的制度收入分布更加不均勻（美國馬里蘭大學(xué)物理學(xué)教授Victor Yakovenko在一次訪談中解釋了為什么現(xiàn)實的資本主義制度收入分布更不均勻：

問：“利潤率下降趨勢”是一個追溯到亞當(dāng)斯密的想法。你可以快速介紹一下嗎？

答：是的。斯密最早注意到利潤率具有下降的趨勢。他將其歸結(jié)為資本家們擠進某個行業(yè)，從而導(dǎo)致價格降低。馬克思則認(rèn)為，這不是影響某個行業(yè)，而是影響整個經(jīng)濟的趨勢。他談到他稱為“絕對過度積累（absolute overaccumulation）”的現(xiàn)象。當(dāng)資本存量的增長比勞動力增長快的時候，就會出現(xiàn)這種現(xiàn)象。

他認(rèn)為，這一現(xiàn)象一定會傾向于推動利潤下降。理由兩個。首先，它造成了對工人的爭奪，使得工資上漲；其次，由于勞動是利潤的來源，如果工資對勞動的比例提高，那么每投資一英鎊資本所能得到的利潤就一定會減少。

這對于發(fā)達國家很重要，因為它們的人口自然增長率很低。這就意味著，隨著時間的推移，利潤率傾向于降到很低的水平。就像我們在日本看到的那樣。

問：你覺得利潤率下降趨勢與歐洲當(dāng)前的危機有何種關(guān)系？

答：與其說它是危機的直接原因，不如說是背景原因。說它是背景原因，是因為相比當(dāng)前的危機而言，七十年代和八十年代的危機更直接地是由于利潤率下降趨勢。積累率的降低使得九十年代出現(xiàn)的部分復(fù)蘇成為可能。這就意味著，資本存量的實際價值增長得更慢了，實際上相對于勞動人口來說下降了。然而，副作用是利潤不在作為實際資本進行積累，而是投資到金融系統(tǒng)，轉(zhuǎn)變?yōu)閷液拖M者的債務(wù)。2008年后這些借款人的信用價值的耗盡，意味著利潤既沒有被借出去，也沒有被投資到生產(chǎn)性領(lǐng)域，這造成了衰退。

問：在未來的十年里，這對社會主義者來說意味著什么？

答：嗯，我認(rèn)為，這里重要的考慮因素是中國的利潤率下降。向中國的工作輸出一直是頂在這里工會頭上一把槍。中國利潤率的下降會減弱這種威脅。更普遍而言，這意味著八十年代出現(xiàn)的積累的矛盾的解決辦法，正在耗盡自身。而且，基于老的新自由主義原則來重啟歐洲經(jīng)濟，也是非常困難的了。

這樣的重組危機為進步政治創(chuàng)造了潛在的空間，如果勞工運動有一個替代性經(jīng)濟戰(zhàn)略的話。

問：我們知道，安德魯·克萊曼（ Andrew Kliman，美國佩斯大學(xué)戴森藝術(shù)與科學(xué)學(xué)院教授,是左翼經(jīng)濟學(xué)家、著名的馬克思主義理論家及分期單一系統(tǒng)解釋<Temporal single-system interpretation,TSSI>學(xué)派的代表人物之一。2012年,克萊曼出版了研究2008年全球金融危機及之后的大衰退的《大失敗:資本主義生產(chǎn)大衰退的根本原因》一書,全面闡釋了當(dāng)前的危機是資本主義發(fā)展的結(jié)果?！g者注）對利潤率下降趨勢以及對這一過程的抵消因素提出了一些觀點。具體來說，資本的毀滅（通過物理的破壞或者陳舊過時而被淘汰）或者生產(chǎn)資本中用于生產(chǎn)資本自身的量的減少造成的資本價值的降低，可以保持住資本的有機構(gòu)成。

答：科技進步往往會通過加速過時資本存量的折舊降低資本勞動比。我傾向于同意這一點。不過，要把收益率恢復(fù)到更高的比如說1960年代的水平，需要勞動生產(chǎn)率前所未有的增長，而這是不太可能的。

問：自動化不是一個新現(xiàn)象。不過，考慮到越來越多以前是人干的活現(xiàn)在都被機器干了，自動化不斷增長的應(yīng)用范圍似乎使得實現(xiàn)充分就業(yè)變得不太可能。你認(rèn)為這只是一個暫時現(xiàn)象，就跟18世紀(jì)晚期引入動力織機時一樣嗎？你認(rèn)為當(dāng)前的自動化會造成新的重要問題，或者能夠提供階級斗爭中新的機會？

答：我認(rèn)為把失業(yè)歸結(jié)于自動化是一個錯誤。自動化已經(jīng)進行兩百年了。它導(dǎo)致勞動從一個領(lǐng)域切換到另一個領(lǐng)域，而不是減少雇傭的總體水平。就業(yè)的下降總是總需求不足的直接結(jié)果，而這又反過來被經(jīng)濟中的收入分配以及利潤率，而不是被自動化水平所決定。

問：你如何看待最低基本收入提案，考慮到生產(chǎn)足夠多的使用價值所需要的勞動量在減少，以及出于環(huán)境方面的原因不管怎樣都得降低經(jīng)濟增長率。

答：我傾向于反對這些提議。在資本主義制度下，這意味著對低工資被雇傭者提供補貼，而這個補貼是從其他工人通過稅收支付的。相反，勞工運動應(yīng)該要求實現(xiàn)他們的勞動所創(chuàng)造的全部價值。

問：蘇聯(lián)有相當(dāng)大比例的人口參與到計劃工作，但是他們應(yīng)付的是一個不太先進的經(jīng)濟，產(chǎn)品比我們現(xiàn)在少得多。你認(rèn)為我們可以對與現(xiàn)存的商品組合同樣多樣化的經(jīng)濟進行計劃嗎？

答：我認(rèn)為真實情況不是這樣。我知道的是，蘇聯(lián)國家計劃委員會（GOSPLAN）只有區(qū)區(qū)幾千人。而且，我們現(xiàn)在有了好得多的信息技術(shù)，所以我不認(rèn)為計劃體制所需要的勞動會是一個問題。

問：蘇聯(lián)在質(zhì)量控制方面存在嚴(yán)重問題。由于投入品的質(zhì)量低劣，有時候工業(yè)部門會自己再生產(chǎn)投入品，或者為了完成計劃任務(wù)，找一些能辦事的人非法地尋求供貨來源。資本主義有時候會通過生產(chǎn)商之間的競爭來解決這一問題。生產(chǎn)商可以從許多可選的來源獲取零件。雖然有時候資本主義在這方面也會有嚴(yán)重的失敗，但是一般說來，不會是如此系統(tǒng)性的問題。

如果生產(chǎn)者不能獨立地尋求產(chǎn)品供貨來源，我們?nèi)绾未_保一個可以應(yīng)付質(zhì)量控制的問題的更合理的計劃體制。

答：我認(rèn)為，采取更加實時的計劃體制能夠部分地解決這個問題。這樣的話，生產(chǎn)單元就能夠更頻繁地基于新的投入品來注冊新的生產(chǎn)計劃，效果與切換供貨商差不多。另一方面，經(jīng)濟以接近完全產(chǎn)能運轉(zhuǎn)會造成一些影響。即使采用新的計劃體制，也很難減弱這種問題。

問：替代性經(jīng)濟方案已經(jīng)有好幾個了。其中包括“參與型經(jīng)濟”（Parecon：Hahnel 和 Albert出版的著作《Parecon: Life After Capitalism》一書中提出的經(jīng)濟方案——譯者注），荷蘭國際共產(chǎn)主義團體（GIK， Group of International Communists of Holland。該組織在1930出版的《共產(chǎn)主義生產(chǎn)和分配的基本原則》（Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution）一書是第一本根據(jù)馬克思《哥達綱領(lǐng)批判》來勾畫社會主義經(jīng)濟藍圖的著作——譯者注），你在《走向新社會主義》（Towards A New Socialism，少年中國評論網(wǎng)站有該書中文版連載——譯者注）一書中提出的方案，還有包容性民主（Inclusive Democracy，希臘經(jīng)濟學(xué)家Takis Fotopoulos提出的經(jīng)濟方案——譯者注），以及其他許多方案。無論這些方案如何可取，都存在難以付諸實施的問題。你怎樣想象我們實際實施這些制度？

答：困難有兩種：1.政治的，2.組織的。第一個困難更重要。有了政治意愿，組織問題都可以解決。人們可以在嘗試組織經(jīng)濟的過程中根據(jù)經(jīng)驗修改推薦的經(jīng)濟模型，直到他們找到一個在特定的情況下能夠?qū)崿F(xiàn)的版本。

問：你認(rèn)為某種形式的互助主義（mutualism），把合作社合在一起，建立某種與資本主義共存的計劃形式，可以作為過渡形式嗎？

答：可以。但是只有當(dāng)立法支持把大部分經(jīng)濟都轉(zhuǎn)換到合作的基礎(chǔ)上，而不顧當(dāng)前股東意愿的情況下才行。

問：目前，邁克爾·海因里希(Michael Heinrich，他是德國《社會科學(xué)批評雜志》的主編——譯者注）和其他價值理論家在社會主義者圈子里很受歡迎。你如何看待海因里希提出的價值理論（value theory）？

答：比起海因里希，我對英國和美國的價值形式理論家更熟悉。但是我感覺到，價值形式理論對當(dāng)代經(jīng)濟學(xué)讓步太多，而且在價值創(chuàng)造的問題上，賦予市場過多的力量，這是不符合實際的。我對他們的方法感到不快的地方在于，他們給社會必要勞動賦予了太多意義，以至于如果使用他們的說法，就會使得勞動價值論變成非科學(xué)的東西。

通過與他們的討論，在我看來，他們認(rèn)為商品在某個給定價格的銷售建立起了物化在其中的勞動的社會必要性。但是如果真是如此，那么，就沒有檢驗善品價格是否決定于其中的勞動量的獨立的辦法。他們最終得到了這樣一個理論，是價格決定了他們當(dāng)做是勞動內(nèi)容的東西。與其說這是勞動價值論，不如說是勞動價格論。科學(xué)的因果論要起作用，如果我們說A導(dǎo)致B，那么A和B必須能夠獨立地測度。如果你只能通過測度B來測度A，那么甚至A存在的推斷都變成不必要的，這當(dāng)然是薩繆爾森反對勞動價值論的理由。

經(jīng)濟物理學(xué)的方法是，A（勞動量）和B（產(chǎn)出銷售的貨幣流）都可以采用實證方法測度，而且我們能夠說明，A的變動導(dǎo)致了B的變動。

問：麻省理工學(xué)院的Jonathan Gruber教授最近在一個在線微觀經(jīng)濟學(xué)課程里說，“經(jīng)濟學(xué)基本上是一個右派科學(xué)…我們的模型永遠假定市場最了解情況，而且會一直被灌輸這種基本立場?！蹦阏J(rèn)為經(jīng)濟學(xué)的確像Gruber說的那樣有偏見嗎？

答：是的。

問：你認(rèn)為，就經(jīng)濟學(xué)作為一門科學(xué)而言，社會主義者應(yīng)該關(guān)注哪些重要的領(lǐng)域？

答：我認(rèn)為，要取得進展，你必須永遠面對針對正在實際上發(fā)生的實際現(xiàn)象提出因果模型。理論發(fā)展必須來自于與實際現(xiàn)象的遭遇。你必須審視當(dāng)前所發(fā)生的事情，盡力用你當(dāng)前的概念裝置對其建模。經(jīng)常會發(fā)現(xiàn)你不能。這時候，你就需要發(fā)展理論，但只有在面對經(jīng)驗事實的情況下，你才能發(fā)展。為了發(fā)展理論，你必須從其他領(lǐng)域借用概念，但是這種借用必須在之前已經(jīng)存在的實際問題的引導(dǎo)之下進行。

問：如果你年輕的社會主義者對經(jīng)濟學(xué)感興趣，你會建議他們怎樣參與到社會主義經(jīng)濟研究計劃的學(xué)習(xí)和推進中來？

答：我強烈建議他們對生活于其中的經(jīng)濟做局勢分析（conjunctural analysis）開始。

附件：訪談英文原文

Interviewer questions are in bold

You’ve done work recently in Econophysics, can you give a brief introduction to what that is and how it’s relevant to socialists?

I can see that it may seem a bit obscure, but you have to remember that Marx said he was out to discover the laws of motion of capitalism–a sentiment very influenced by physics. What is econophysics? Well in the main it covers any attempt to understand economic phenomena in terms of the conceptual apparatus that physics has developed for the study of systems with a high degree of freedom. As such it borrows heavily from ideas developed in statistical mechanics.

It has originated from two main sources. The mathematicians Farjoun and Machover who studied capitalism as a chaotic system and deduced the emergence of prices which would be proportional to labour values on statistical mechanics grounds. More recently there has been an influx of physics graduates into jobs in the financial sector where they have applied their own conceptual background to economic problems.

Since this latter work is paid for by their employers in the main, it tends to be rather focused on financial markets, but it has created an opening whereby people with a primarily mathematical or physics background have started looking at the economy without the prior ideological formation that they would have gotten from an economics degree. This creates studies that are much more empirical and less ideologically based than what economists tend to turn out.

Its relevance to socialists is that you can use these methods to analyse capitalism and understand why the labour theory of value holds, and why income distribution becomes so skewed.

Can you briefly describe what you think are important results that we’ve found in this area?

To my mind the important results are:

That the labour theory of value is basically accurate.

That any market system has a pretty uneven distribution of income–this would apply even to a system of worker owned firms.

That the existing system, however, contains an even more uneven distribution of income than would be expected just from the considerations above.

The “Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall” (TRPF), is an idea that I believe goes back to Adam Smith. Can you give a quick description of the idea?

Yes–Smith originally noticed that the rate of profit tended to fall. He put this down to capitalists piling into a line of business and driving the price down. Marx argued that this is not something that affects just individual lines of business but the whole economy. He spoke of what he termed ‘a(chǎn)bsolute overaccumulation’ which occurs when the capital stock builds up faster than the growth of the workforce.

He argued that this phenomenon must tend to drive down profits for two reasons. Firstly it generates competition for workers and allows wages to rise; secondly since labour is the source of profit, if there is a rise in the capital to labour ratio, then the amount of profit for each ￡1 of capital invested must go down.

This is important for developed economies since they have a low rate of natural population growth and that means that over time the rate of profit tends to fall very low as we see in Japan.

How do you think the TRPF is relevant to the current crisis in Europe?

It is a background cause rather than an immediate cause. Background, because the crisis of the 70s/80s was more immediately due to the falling rate of profit than the current one is. The partial recovery that occurred in profitability in the 90s was made possible by a lowering of the rate of accumulation, which meant that the real value of capital stock grew more slowly, or due to depreciation, actually fell in proportion to the working population. The side effect though, was that the profits which were no longer accumulated as real capital, were invested in the financial system and converted into loans to the state or to consumers. The exhaustion of the credit worthiness of these borrowers after 2008 meant that profits were neither being lent out nor reinvested productively, which generated the recession.

What does this mean for socialists in the coming decades?

Well, in my view an important consideration here is the declining rate of profit in China. This will make the threat to jobs in Europe from the export of the jobs to China will be less of a gun to the head of the trades unions here. But more generally it means that the mode of resolution of the contradictions of accumulation that came into place in the 80s is exhausting itself, and it is very difficult for the European economy to re-start on the basis of the old neo-liberal formulas.

Such restructuring crises create potential openings for progressive politics if the labour movement has an alternative economic strategy.

I know that Andrew Kliman has made some statements about the TRPF and countervailing tendencies to this process. Specifically, the destruction of capital (either through physical destructor or obsolescence) or its decline in value due to the lower amounts of labour in producing capital used in production itself can keep the organic composition of capital.

I would tend to agree that the improvement in technology does tend to lower the capital labour ratio by accelerating the depreciation of obsolete capital stock. However, to restore profitability to–say–the levels of the 60s would require an unprecedented rate of growth in labour productivity which is unlikely.

Automation is not a new phenomenon. However, its increasing scope seems to make it unlikely we will attain full employment, considering that a lot of the tasks previously done by people are now done by machines. Do you think this is a merely temporary phenomenon, as it was with the introduction of the power loom in the late 18th century? Do you think our current stage of automation could cause significant new problems or offer new opportunities in the class struggle?

I think it is a mistake to attribute unemployment to automation. Automation has been going on for two hundred years now, and results in a shift in labour from one area to another rather than a reduction in the overall level of employment. A decline in employment is always the direct result of a slackening of aggregate demand, which in turn is influenced by the distribution of income within the economy and the rate of profit rather than the level of automation.

What do you think about minimum basic income proposals, given that sufficient use values can be produced with decreasing amounts of human labour, and that there may be environmental reasons to curtail economic growth in any event?

I tend to oppose these. Under a capitalist system they amount to a subsidy to low wage employers and a subsidy that other workers pay out of their taxes. Instead the labour movement should be demanding the full value that their labour creates.

The Soviet Union had a quite large percentage of the population involved in planning, and yet they were dealing with a much less advanced economy with far fewer goods than we have at present. Do you think we can plan with as diverse an array of commodities as currently exists?

I don’t think this is true. My understanding was that there were only a few thousand people employed in GOSPLAN. Moreover, we now have a much better information technology so I don’t think that the labour required by the planning system would be a problem.

The USSR had serious problems with quality control. It was sometimes the case that industries would reproduce the input products themselves because of shoddy quality, or source them illegally through fixers in order to make planning schedules. Capitalism sometimes deals with this problem by having competing producers which allow producers to source parts from any number of alternatives. Sometimes capitalism also has serious failures along this dimension but it is not generally such a systemic problem.

How can we ensure a more reasonable system of planning that will deal with the problems of quality control if products can not be sourced independently by producers?

I think that in part this can be dealt with by moving to a more real time planning system so that units of production can register new production plans based on new inputs more frequently, thus getting much of the effect of switch in suppliers. On the other hand there are some effects that come from running the economy at close to full capacity that may be hard to mitigate even in these circumstances.

There are quite a number of alternative economic proposals, including Parecon, the GIK proposal, your proposal from your book Towards a New Socialism, Inclusive Democracy and many others. Whatever one thinks about the desirability they all have the problem of being difficult to put into practice. How do you imagine we can practically implement these systems?

Well, there are two kinds of difficulty: 1. Political, 2. Organisational. The first is the more important. Given the political will the organisational problems would be soluble. People would modify the suggested economic model in the light of experience trying to organise it until they had a version they could attain in the given circumstances.

Do you think some form of mutualism, where cooperatives come together in order to institute some form of planning coexisting with capitalism might be a transitional form?

Yes, but only if there was the legislative support to convert a large portion of the economy to a mutual basis, irrespective of the wishes of current shareholders.

Currently Heinrich and other value theorists are enjoying a certain popularity in socialist circles. What do you think of value theory as put forward by Heinrich?

I am more familiar with the English and American value form theorists than Heinrich but I feel that value form theory concedes rather much to contemporary economics and attributes more power to the market in creating value than is realistic. My unhappiness with their approach is that they overload the meaning of socially necessary labour in such a way that, were their meaning to be used, they would make the labour theory of value unscientific.

From discussions with them, it seems to me that they hold that it is the sale of commodities at a given price that establishes the social necessity of the labour embodied in them. But if that is the case then there is no independent way of checking whether the price of commodities is determined by their labour content. They end up with a theory in which it is prices that determine what they count as labour content, and you end up with a price theory of labour rather than a labour theory of value. For a scientific theory of causality to be of any use, if we say A causes B, then A and B must be independently measurable. If you can only measure A by measuring B, then the inference that A even exists becomes unnecessary, which of course was Samuelson’s objection to the labour theory of value.

The econophysics approach is that both A (labour content) and B (money flow from sales of output) are in fact empirically measurable, and that we can show that variations in B are caused by variations in A.

Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at MIT recently said in an online microeconomics course, “Economics is fundamentally a right wing science…our models always assume the market knows best, and you are going to be indoctrinated into this basic position.” Do you think that economics is as biased as Gruber makes out?

Yes.

What do you think are important areas for socialists to be looking at in terms of economics as a science?

I think that to make progress you always have to face up to getting a causal model for some real phenomenon that is going on in the world. Theoretical advances have to come from a confrontation with real phenomena. You have to look at what is happening and see if you can model it with your current conceptual apparatus. Often you will find that you cannot. At that point you need to develop the theory, but it is only in confrontation with the empirical that you can advance. To make the advance you may have to borrow concepts from other domains, but this borrowing has to be guided by pre-existing real problems.

If young socialists are interested in economics, how would you suggest they get involved in learning and advancing a programme of socialist economic research?

I would strongly suggest that they start off by doing a conjunctural analysis of the economy they live in.