SFEcon’s continuing appreciation of Keynes owes to the undercurrent of his dissatisfaction with economics’ equilibrium reference frame. Our greatest hope for the cultivated expansion of his thinking lies therefore with the Post Keynesians and their willingness to convey understanding via the emulation technology used by all other technical disciplines.

Unfortunately, our mundane engineering dynamics present an insufficiency of what would seem to be the ‘glamour’ requisite for portraying economic dynamics. This is perhaps best instantiated in our apparent misunderstanding of the passage by which Professor Joan Robinson launched Post Keynesianism’s jihad against mainstream thinking:

For Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Marx the central subject of discussion was the accumulation of means of production and of property. In a stationary state there is no accumulation. The neoclassical school, which came into fashion in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, introduced two quite distinct ways of eliminating accumulation from models, which were intended in other respects to correspond to reality. One was to consider the situation, so to speak, today, with the physical stocks of commodities and means of production that happen to be in existence; the other was to consider the situation at Kingdom Come when the process of accumulation has been completed and no one finds it worth while to acquire anything more.¹

The neoclassical cost curve dictates that an output rate cannot increase unless the output's price also increases <see illustration>. We agree that this artifact of neoclassicism is necessarily true only in those instances allowed by Professor Robinson, viz.: her today and at Kingdom Come. We also join with the Post Keynesians in observing that, in actual processes of economic adjustment, a commodity’s price will generally fall as its production rises to meet an increase in demand. Our break with the Keynesian dynamicists has to do with what one makes of this disconnect between theory and observation: where they set out in search of a new economic causality, we find a perfectly satisfactory resolution in making the old causality dynamic.

Our sense of ‘the proper’ in dynamic modeling would see no contradictions among the above assertions and observations regarding the neoclassical cost curve. Moreover, our notions about dynamics would require that one and the same model must seamlessly represent the economy’s instantaneous states, the succession of these states that follow disequilibrating stimuli, and the final state at which all such stimuli have been absorbed. A dynamic theory of anything is confined to what happens at a given moment: the reality of time contains no long run; no short run; only a ‘now’. All a dynamic machine ‘knows’ at any point in time is its current state and its rules for getting to its next state, one differential element of time hence.

To construct an experiment that might engage Professor Robinson’s point, we require that an elementary model adjust to one sector’s production function suddenly becoming more efficient with respect to all its inputs. We can report that this experiment eventuates in a new optimal steady state wherein the performance of every sector is improved. This model’s causality is the same at every disequilibrium now, up to and including up the ultimate equilibrium of Kingdom Come. The succession of disequilibrium states leading from the initial to the final optimum is effected by the accumulation and dis-accumulation of the sectors’ means of production. Every sector’s cost curve always indicates that increased output requires an increase in price; and yet the model’s final state has the more efficient sector producing more output, while delivering it at a lower relative price than was the case at the experiment’s inception.