Kaldor sets the pace

In order to determine the rate of profits in capitalist society it is necessary, as we saw in chapter 4, to introduce further factors from outside the production system itself. Certain economists – Kaldor, Joan Robinson, Pasinetti – have argued that the factors are the saving propensities associated with different classes of income receivers in the community and the rate of growth of the economic system as given either by the rate of growth of the labour force and Harrod neutral technical progress or by the capitalists themselves, depending upon the author concerned. (This is an avenue that, it must be said, not all or even most economists would wish to tread, or, at least, not for the same reasons.) These views have been discussed in a series of articles which appeared, principally, in the Review of Economic Studies and the Economic Journal: Kaldor [1955–6, 1957, 1959a, 1959b], Pasinetti [1962], Meade [1963], Pasinetti [1964], Chang [1964], Meade and Hahn [1965], Pasinetti [1966b], Meade [1966], Samuelson and Modigliani [1966a], Pasinetti [1966c], Kaldor [1966], Robinson [1966], Samuelson and Modigliani [1966b], Sato [1966], Britto [1968], Davidson [1968b], Morishima [1969], chapter ii, Nell [1970], Robinson [1970c].

It should be stressed at the outset that some of the writers concentrate on the characteristics of equilibrium when the economy is constrained by some means or other to be growing at the above rate of growth; others, though, are concerned also to show that there are forces which will take the economy to such an equilibrium rate of growth and keep it there, as well as to examine the characteristics of the equilibrium itself.