Grr. Too many typos and ill formulated statements to fix. The gist is fine.
On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 10:10 PM, Julio Huato <[email protected]> wrote: > 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
