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Families of Strongly Curved and of Nearly Linear Wage Curves: A Contribution to the Debate about the Surrogate Production Function

BERTRAM SCHEFOLD

A majority of economists had returned to the use of production functions, in spite of the Cambridge critique, while a minority continues to believe that the construction has definitively been shown to be illegitimate. The paper proposes to work towards a reconciliation between these points of view by showing that the wage curves of some families of economic systems are nearly linear so that an approximate surrogate production function seems justified, while other families of economic systems lead to strong curvatures. Random systems approach linearity.