Comparative Growth Rates: A Rejoinder

Mr Dobb is quite right: I think than an arithmetical example can prove something, namely, that a certain hypothesis is of no general validity and this is what I have demonstrated in my Note. (It might prove, in addition, that the compiler of the example is not very good at arithmetic.) As regards Mr Dobb's tenet of growth rates, I am not of course in disagreement with the principle, and the difference between us is merely that he regards it as a significant new Russian discovery, whereas I am under the impression that it has been known to Western economists for some considerable time under the name of the acceleration principle. And to say, as I did, that the r/C ratio has no practical significance, because for well known reasons no reliable estimates of C can be formed, is not, as Mr Dobb suggests, the end of all economics.