Capital theory ‘paradoxes’ and paradoxical results: resolved or continued?

Abstract

Capital theory controversies and ‘paradoxes’ showed that, due to price-feedback effects, the wage–production price–profit rate curves may display shapes inconsistent with the requirements of the neoclassical theory of value and distribution. Subsequent findings on a number of quite diverse actual single-product economies suggested that the impact of those effects is of limited empirical significance. This paper argues that, by focusing on the distributions of the eigenvalues and singular values of the system matrices, we can further study these issues and derive some meaningful theoretical results consistent with the available empirical evidence. Consequently, the real paradox, in the sense of knowledge vacuum and, thus, requiring further research, is the distributions of the characteristic values and not really the ‘paradoxes in capital theory’.