Transformational Growth and Learning: Developing Craft Technology into Scientific Mass Production

There is a famous detective story in which the clue is the dog that did not bark. An apparent break-in has resulted in a murder, but to the dog there was no intruder; the entry was nothing out of the ordinary, thus suggesting an inside job! The history of economic thought presents us with similar clues in the multiplier that was not there, in the work of Ricardo and Marx and, indeed, other nineteenth-century economists. Why, when they had developed all the analytical tools necessary, did they fail to point to the dynamic processes of the multiplier? The problem is particularly striking since the direct and indirect labour embodied in a good is the employment multiplier for that good, and the set of labour values for the economy as a whole is the matrix employment multiplier for the economy. Why did Ricardo and Marx not take the comparatively simple step of examining the dynamic process of employment adjusting through the multiplier?