Spectral Theory of Value and Actual Economies

This book develops a unified treatment of the income distributioncapitalvalue problems with respect to actual economies, and then gradually turns to the issues of effective demand and capitalist accumulation fluctuations from both political economy and economic policy perspectives. That treatment, on the one hand, places produced means of production, positive profits, and capital accumulation at the centre of the analysis and, on the other hand, is analytically based on the modern control theory. Hence, the authors investigation is concerned with inputoutput representations of actual single and joint production, heterogeneous labour, and open economies; zeroes in on the characteristic value distributions of the system matrices; and, finally, derives meaningful theoretical results consistent with the empirical evidence, and vice versa. The main topics addressed are the uncontrollable/unobservable aspects of the real-world economies, the powerful low-order spectral approximationsand reconstructions of the inter-industry structure of productionvaluedistributive variables relationships, the critical-constructive appraisal of both mainstream and radical theories of value, the matrix demand multipliers and demand-switching policies in heterogeneous capital worlds, and the circular inter-actions amongst income distribution, effective demand, accumulation, and technical conditions of production. Written on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the publication of both Piero Sraffas Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities and Rudolf E. Kalmans paper On the general theory of control systems, this book provides a consistent and comprehensive framework for theoretical, empirical, and economic policy research.