I recently stumbled across an old Tyler Cowen post at Marginal Revolution — on “zero marginal product workers” — which perfectly illustrates the circularity of marginal productivity analysis, and how it hides power relations behind a facade of neutral economic laws. As Cowen initially states the argument, we have had a recovery in output, but…

View or download a PDF copy of Kevin Carson’s C4SS Study: The Methodenstreit Revisited: Marginalism and the Lost Power Context The Methodenstreit was a long-running and fairly acrimonious debate over the methodology of economic science, between Carl Menger (posthumously regarded as the founder of Austrian economics) and Gustav Schmoller of the German Historical School, which eventually…