But competition drives costs down!

once economic decisions are pictured as being made sequentially, as in real life, ownership patterns turn out to evolve through time in highly specific ways?— and they systematically gravitate toward precisely the kinds of patterns that generate indeterminacy of factor prices.

As a result, the central problem with marginal productivity theory that John Hicks recognized in the 1930s has never gone away: without the arbitrary assumption of freely differentiable production functions, wages and profits are not fixed by technologies and tastes. They are set by “something else”?— something outside the competitive model.

Ackerman & Beggs in Jacobin