Money and Markets: Essays in Honor of Leland B. Yeager

Reflections on reswitching and roundaboutness 187(now the University of Missouri at Rolla). Because of the mathematical orientationof that course and its focus on the calculus of present values and internal rates ofreturn, my classmates and I were fully aware of the possibility of multiple internalrates of return. And as a mathematical matter, in turns out, the occurrence of multiplerates emerges out of circumstances similar to those that give rise to techniquereswitching, a phenomenon that lies at the heart of the Cambridge controversies.As engineering students, however, none of us was aware of the broader economicimplications of movements in interest rates, let alone the supposedly threateningimplications for neoclassical production theory of the paradoxical circumstanceknown as technique reswitching: a decline in the rate of interest could lead to theadoption of less roundabout, less capital intensive methods of production.In the late 1970s after a switching of careers (from engineering to economics), Iwas invited to comment on a conference paper by Leland Yeager (1979) titled“Capital Paradoxes and the Concept of Waiting.” Drawing on Gustav Cassel,Yeager dealt specifically with the issue of dimensions. If the interest rate is a price, itis the price of a factor measured in the complex units of dollar-years. As will bedemonstrated in a subsequent section, this Casselian unit (dollar-years) is thestraightforward result of a simple exercise in unit analysis – a procedure I had usedmany times over in engineering applications. Among other insights in Yeager’spaper was a healthy perspective on the Cambridge controversies, making full use ofthe dual dimensionality of Casselian waiting. (I now realize that Harcourt and hisfellow Cantabrigians would be wholly dismissive of Cassel’s and Yeager’s dollaryearon the grounds of its incorporating the verboten value dimension.)My role at the conference was to provide an Austrian perspective on thesetroublesome issues. Dubbing my comment “Waiting in Vienna” (Garrison 1979),I leveraged Yeager’s critical account of the seemingly paradoxical techniquereswitchingexamples by transplanting the logic from the theory of capital to thetheory of evolution. By constructing an analogously paradoxical species-reswitchingexample (in which the survival of the fittest is violated at one of the switch points),I cast doubt on the wisdom of Charles Darwin. I considered the changing formsof life that we might observe as we travel from the North Pole to the South Pole.If switching from polar bears to alligators (somewhere between the Arctic Circleand the Tropic of Cancer) is consistent with Darwinian theory, then switchingback (somewhere between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Antarctic Circle) isinconsistent with Darwinian theory. The intent of my parody on paradox, ofcourse, was to question the meaningfulness of the charges leveled by Cambridge,UK against the Austrian theory of capital and interest.Paradoxes and frameworksIn the hands of Cambridge, UK, the capital controversies thrive on paradox. Iftheoretical framework X entails paradoxical characteristics that seem to undercutthe fundamental relationships on which it is erected, then theoretical framework Xshould be abandoned in favor of theoretical framework Y. The X, of course, isneoclassicism – with due attention to the temporal dimension of production