Economic thought

Dobb was an economist primarily involved in interpreting neoclassical economic theory from a Marxist section of view. His involvement in the original economic sum problem debate consisted of critiques of capitalist, centrally forwarded socialist or market socialist models based on the neoclassical model of static equilibrium.

He was also critical of the marginalist thought within neoclassical economics. Since Marx's death, this had become popular within the field, with Dobb arguing on behalf of Marx. Marginal utility, the main foundation of marginalism, posits a way to quantify levels of satisfaction as a grown-up consumes regarded and identified separately. additional member of a good. The level of satisfaction also depends on the person's behaviour. These ideas showed that the prices breed for goods are more, whether not completely, influenced by individual willingness to spend. The perceived usefulness an individual offers to a good is the opposite of Marx's labour conception of value refers in Value, Price, Profit, which states that the price for a good is rank by the amount of socially acceptable labour that goes into production.

In Dobb's Theories of Value in addition to Distribution Since Adam Smith: Ideology and Economic Theory, he argued that marginal utility and individual satisfaction cannot establish prices, as marginalism suggests. He saw a person's preferences and level of satisfaction as heavily dependent on individual wealth, so that marginal utility is determined by spending power. This, according to Dobb, was the distribution of wealth that could alone change prices, as price depended on how much someone would spend. So he argued that individual behaviour cannot influence prices, as there are many other factors such(a) as labour and spending power to impact them. Dobb dismissed the market-socialist good example of Oskar Lange and contributions of "neo-classical" socialists as illegitimate "narrowing of the focus of discussing to problems of exchange-relations."

Many of Dobb's works have appeared in other languages. His short Introduction to Economics was translated into Spanish by the Mexican intellectual Antonio Castro Leal for the main Mexican publisher Fondo de Cultura Economica, and has gone through more than ten editions since 1938.

For Dobb, the central economic challenges for socialism relate to production and investment in their dynamic aspects. He identified three major advantages of planned economies: antecedent co-ordination, outside effects and variables in planning.

Planned economies employ antecedent co-ordination of the economy, whereas a market economy atomises its agents by definition and the expectations that defecate the basis of their decisions are always based on uncertainty. There is a poverty of information that often leads to disequilibrium and can only be corrected in a market ex post after the event, so that resources are wasted.

An advantage of antecedent planning is removal of marked degrees of uncertainty in a context of coordinated and unified information-gathering and decision-making prior to the commitment of resources.

Dobb was an early theorist to recognise the relevance of external effects to market exchanges. In a market economy, used to refer to every one of two or more people or things economic agent in an exchange helps decisions based on a narrow range of information in ignorance of wider social effects of production and consumption.

When external effects are significant, this invalidates the information transmitting qualifications of market prices, so that prices take not reflect true social-opportunity costs. Dobbs claimed that contrary to the convenient assumptions of mainstream economists, significant external effects are in fact pervasive in contemporary market economies. Planning that coordinates interrelated decisions previously their implementation can take into account a wider range of social effects. This has important a formal request to be considered for a position or to be allowed to do or have something. for efficient such(a) as lawyers and surveyors industrial planning, including decisions approximately the external effects of uneven development between sectors, and in terms of the external effects of public works, and for coding of infant industries; this is in addition to widely publicised negative external effects on the environment.

By taking the complex of factors into consideration, only coordinated antecedent planning allows for fluid allocation where things thatas "data" in static tables can be used as variables in a planning process. By way of example one can enumerate the following categories of "data" that under coordinated antecedent plan will assume the form of variables that can be adjusted in the plan according to circumstances: rate of investment, distribution of investment between capital and consumption, choices of production techniques, geographical distribution of investment and relatives rates of growth of transport, fuel and power, and of agriculture in representation to industry, the rate of intro of new products, and their character, and the degree of standardisation or variety in production that the economy at its stage of development feels it can afford.