Doug, just a query.
Are the figures you quoted net of outsourced components? I know when
Canadian economists evaluated the effect of NAFTA on Canadian
manufacturing, the major increase in manufacturing exports was
accounted for by an offsetting major increase in imports of manufactured
components. i.e. 'manufacturing' was heavily comprised of assembly
taking advantage of lower cost labour in Canada (e.g. in the auto
industry). (The biggest part of the lower cost was accounted for by
medicare in Canada). Also, almost all of the computer manufacturing
industry in Canada is composed of assembly of imported parts. Yet
despite the increase in manufacturing GDP, the number employed has been
steadily falling, particularly since the rise in the value of the Cdn
Loony has eroded the advantage of lower labour costs.
Paul Phillips
Doug Henwood wrote:
ravi wrote:
I am afraid I do not understand your anger. That people are honest,
competent and serious (or that their processes are open) does not
exclude the influence of ideology or theory. Are you saying that Leigh
is wrong because:
(a) the numbers do not come from politically influenced government
sources?
[OR]
(b) that they are thoroughly vetted in some way by those analysing/using
them? If so, how?
Everyone is influenced by ideology - there's no way to escape it. As
Jim pointed out, the only thing that counts in the official stats is
monetary exchange, which is, after all, a pretty limited metric for
judging human life. But that's capitalism for you. But within that
constraint, the numbers are collected and published quite cleanly,
with minimal political influence (in the narrow, partisan sense of
political, not the upper-case sense of big-time Ideology: i.e.,
George Bush doesn't call the BEA and tell them to cook up the gross
product by industry series, but the system itself is one based on
monetary transactions). If they were cooked in the way that Leigh and
others like to say, bourgeois economists and central bankers wouldn't
be using them.
Doug
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