Henwood, Perelman, DeLong and Sawicky are hovering around the ontological
argument for the expansion of trade, "as if the power of compelling
or inducing men to labour twice as much at the mills of Gaza for the
enjoyment of the Philistines, were proof of any thing but a tyranny
or an ignorance twice as powerful. (anon, 1821)"
Contra Perelman and DeLong, the assumption is not neoclassical but is a
throwback to classical political economy -- or perhaps an imperfectly
eradicated residue of the latter that has become the defining excrescence
on the former. The issue at stake is trade -- not simply foreign trade --
and the distracting binary is "foreign trade bad"/"domestic trade good".
Doug Henwood wrote,
> Gains from trade could be - I'm using the
> conditional because this sort of thing is hard to prove definitively
> - very broadly distributed, while the losses could be very narrowly
> distributed. The fact that EPI-style trade politics isn't all that
> popular is a clue that that may be the case.
Michael Perelman wrote,
> Not long after Jevons et al. formulated neoclassical economics, political
> commentators began to tell workers that they should evaluate their
> situation in terms of rising levels of consumption rather than their
> working conditions.
Brad DeLong
> Nah. It's time for pas d'enemie sur la gauche.The neoclassical
> assumption that your welfare is primarily your welfare as a consumer
> (plus a *private* disutility of work term) automatically rules out
> any concern for the producer-side benefits of living in a vibrant
> production-based community rather than being an anomic seller of
> one's labor-power.
Max Sawicky wrote,
> To elevate consumer well-being above working-class income is to say
> that, as an historical matter, cost reductions in consumer goods are
> the greater contributor to general well-being than increases in
> income (whether from labor or from government programs) and output.
Temps Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
