Jim, > What evidence? It depends on your starting and end points.
Of course, it does. But use the data that exists. And, as Lenin said, take the whole of the data; not subsets. Here's a simple exercise. I tried this as a student in the late 1990s, after I realized that *mathematically* it was impossible to prove the "law" in the terms Marx posed it -- i.e. with constant real wages. I have no time now to update the exercise I did back then (and it was all for my own piece of mind), but I am almost sure that over the last few years the trend persisted. Download the latest PWT and use the perpetual inventory method to estimate capital stocks (all in real terms) for all the countries in the database. It's a simple sum, so Excel will do it (or as the PWT people to email you their own measures of capital stock). If you are willing to cut corners, just take the 20 countries with larger PPP GDPs -- as per Pareto, they must produce about 80% of global GDP. They concentrate conditions that Marx would recognize as dominated by capitalist production. Assume any reasonable mean life of a representative piece of capital. (The PIM is pretty good when you have a long time series, and you do with the PWT, as the imprecision of the initial points becomes totally irrelevant as the capital stock gets dominated by the latest flows of fixed capital formation.) Then take the ratio of GDP to capital stock -- that's your proxy for the profit rate. It gives you the ceiling of the profit rate, as annual value added is the ceiling of annual surplus value. Plot. And presto: you'll have a pretty good idea of what happened to the 20 dominant national profit rates and (by implication) to the global profit rate from the late 1950s and up to recent years. If you wish, fit linear trendlines and check out the slopes. Let us know what you find. I believe the secular trends are pretty robust -- and predominantly negative. (Of course, China, Brazil, Russia, etc. will be the outliers, but they won't reverse the global trend.) You can always question the data, this or that. But that does it for my low standards of proof. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
