> >There's no question that imperialism was essential to the rise of
>>European capitalism. But what about its contribution to First World
>>wealth in the present? No doubt greater than zero, but how much?
>>Does anyone have any good ideas? Doug
>
>It would seem to be bounded from above by the share of first-world
>consumption, investment, and government purchases that are made in
>countries with GDP per capita levels less than half that of the U.S.
>So less than 3%.
>Of course, this is not "dialectical"... Brad DeLong
>
>
>Seems to me this takes as given the prices of
>those purchases, whereas the raison d'etre of
>primitive accumulation is to enforce sub-
>optimal prices with violence. The question
>is the amount of economic rent, methinks.
>Even that would be a lower bound, insofar as
>rents implied by an 'efficient' price counter-
>factual took for granted an unreasonable efficiency
>norm predicated on existing income distribution.
>Plus it's not dialectical, whatever that is.
>
>mbs
I'm not sure I understand you. We spend some of our productive
capacity making the stuff we sell in order to buy the 3% of our
consumption that are imports from poor countries. If those imports
were shut off, we would take that 3% of our productive capacity and
devote it to some other use. We wouldn't get the whole 3% back, but
we'd get some back.
I sense an ambiguity in the definition of "wealth" here. I'm acting
like a national income accountant, and you're acting like a
neoclassical economist, but one who wants a quantitative measure of
the gap between the indifference curves we are on and the
indifference curves we would be on if trade with poor countries
stopped tomorrow.
One thing is clear: if trade with poor countries stopped tomorrow,
*all* of Hawaii would quickly become one big coffee plantation...
Brad DeLong
