before we discuss whether this phenemonon is observable in the data we have to get definitions down first.
I find it amazing that everyone can blather on about the tendency for the rate of profit to fall without acknowledging that Marx explicitly said that his was a simple model that would need disaggregating into rent, unproductive labor, profit to enterprise, government . "That the fall of the rate of profit can further be delayed by the omission of existing deductions from profit, e.g. by a lowering of taxes, reduction of ground rent etc., is actually not our concern here, although of importance in practice, for these are themselves portions of the profit under another name, and are appropriated by persons other than the capitalists themselves" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch15.htm further this profit must be divided by the last monetary price paid for capital ie non-labor inputs and labor inputs (or a real price measured in the unit of account. in other words, if the capitalist exchanged his product for a machine you would take the exchange value of that product in another context and measure that against the machine to get it's monetary price. this only applies in a generally capitalist economy) any discussion of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall that doesn't acknowledge these elements isn't useful. It should also be noted that any claim about effects emanating from FROP should be taken with large gobs of salt since most of those claims implicitly assume the fall in the profit rate impacts profit to enterprise and not one of the other "portions of the profit under another name". -- -Nathan Tankus ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
