Muh empirical correlation between labor time and price

first and last are directly adressed by kliman.

Good to know, I have not read the PDF, I was basing myself on the example user did.

Obviously my example was an oversimplification, but dead labor was taken into account (somewhat) by considering profit instead of revenue, but anyway, that's kind of beside the point. The main point is that size messes with the data. Maybe take a look at the pdf in to see how it can lead to all kinds of wonky conclusions.

But isn't that what Shaikh et al are aiming for (getting as close as given the quality of the data they have to work with allows).
Yes, for the total aggregate that's a vacuous statement set by definition, and couldn't be disproven for any other statement of that type (e. g. total price = total number of garden gnomes, money amount per garden gnome changing would just be called inflation or deflation measured in terms of garden-gnome value). This is something everybody in the dispute is aware of, Kliman, Cottrell & Cockshott, Dave Zachariah etc. The point was that the somewhat aggregated data doesn't show the same correlation it does with labour when using other inputs (Cockshott mentioned this being done for electricity showing lower correlation).

I don't have the impression that anybody here or elsewhere vouching for Kliman actually fully understands his arguments, they get the firemen thing (but not whether it's a fitting comparison) and like his conclusions and want them to be true, but everything between apparently looks as foggy to them as it is to me, perhaps more so.

Why would they want it to be true? If cockshott was right we wouldn't even have to talk about the transformation problem.

I always thought that according to Marx price is a result of value interacting with various other factors such as demand, monopoly/oligopoly etc.. Since I've read Kapital quite a lot of time has passed so my memory most certainly has a lot of holes in it. Could someone explain to me what according to Kliman the ltv actually entails?

So basically in a simple economy with equalization of profit rates or disruption of supply and demand price is just the expression of the value of a commodity in money. But we don't have a perfect economy and in real life competition leads to a tendency for profit rates to equalize so that everyone has the same rate of return. This however seems to contradict the theory of surplus value because if the theory of surplus value were true more labor intensive industrys should produce more value and get more profit (because dead labor can't produce new value). So Marx came up with the idea of the transformation of values into prices of production. Basically the "price of production" is the cost price or cost of production of the commodity plus the percentage of the total surplus value each capitalist gets. So while value rarely equals price the total value is equal to the total price and the total profit is equal to the total surplus value.

Thanks. Is that the argument that is elaborated upon in reclaiming marx's capital? I'm thinking about reading it.

After reading the parody, I'm now 95 % sure Kliman got it wrong. The joke goes like this: Guy who prides himself in doing SCIENCE reports a correlation between Christianity and total income in an area in the US, Christianity measured in total number of Christians. He comes to the conclusion that there is some significant correlation. He also tests that for other religions and concludes that Christianity is special in predicting total income.

Of course, this happens because we are not talking about income per head here, and a group's income correlates with the size of the group and being Christian is common, so there is good correlation between the number of Christians and the number of people, and the ratios of the amount of people of a minority religion in different areas doesn't correlate quite as well with the respective ratios of the amount of people in general in these areas.

So, why isn't that knee-slapper a sound rebuttal? Because the correlation is there. We can tell the economist in this hypothetical story that he is a bit dull and there are better measures (just use total population), but the economist is still correct that it works better with Christians than with e.g. Jews, who are less evenly spread across the country. This brings us back to the aforementioned weakness of a contrarian: being unable to see a statement as true when it is also dull. I also strongly suspect that, as the paper goes on rephrasing some particular statistical maneuvers like that double-log shoopdawoop thing, Kliman isn't enough of a math guy to actually understand those (nor his fans, nor the fans of the other side, people just seem to pick based on the conclusions they like to hear).

In the Christian story, mass conversions to Islam all over the country would reduce the quality of the Christianity-based predictor of income in an area and increase the quality of the Islam-based predictor, which is certainly an argument for how superficial the theory of that hypothetical economist is. But what is the faith-conversion analog here for the labour-time based theory of price estimates? Does the analog show in a similar manner how superficial the theory is? Does it even exist?

No. This is explained in capital volume 3 what he explains in RMC is this:
There is also a huge controversy over this transformation problem basically set in place by one guy. So after Marx death a russian economist named Bortkiewicz thought he found a contradiction in Marx's math. The inputs to the production period in his math were in values not prices (at least in the example math) and capitalists actually buy things at prices. So what he did is set up a table that operates in simple reproduction. So basically the exact quantitys of physical goods are reproduced each production period. He assumes that the price of inputs must be equal to the price of outputs and tried to solve. When he did this he found that the value's and price's of all the commoditys changed (and because he had set input prices to equal output prices total value =/= total price) he created a solution but it could only uphold one of the equalitys at a time and only be arbitrarily enforcing it. It also made the falling rate of profit incoherent. The TSSI and kliman attempt to save Marx's value theory by making 2 assumptions. 1. There is only one cost price. The inputs into the production period are in the "value of the price" not the value of the commodity, basically price is determined from value, they are not dual seperate systems. and 2. Input prices =/= output prices and can change over a production period. The book is an explanation of the controversy and the TSSI solution. Its definitely a good read.