RE: the almighty dollar redux
Two months is forever. I wonder now about the tension between providing liquidity to equity markets and the now questionable safe-haven overhang of the dollar. The only way that an ongoing Fed liquidity bailout of equity markets can avoid devaluing the dollar is with an equally sustained, internationally co-ordinated reflation, which presumably would have quite different financial and political effects on the economies of the countries involved. Not to mention the differential effects of inflation on creditors and debtors. Obviously, we're not talking about a one-day wonder when the New York markets re-open next week. Aren't we looking at a new regime of financial flows, terms of trade, exchange rate instabilities, crisis interventions and controls? Rhetorically, we are already hearing demands from the U.S. for solidarity from its allies in its declared war against terrorism. Realistically, one can expect such demands -- and responses to them -- to lap over onto agendas that are not unambigously connected. Meanwhile, I presume the rest of the world -- Turkey, Argentina, Brazil -- are taking the day off while the U.S.A. sorts this one out. From: Tom Walker Subject: RE: the almighty dollar ( the crisis of democracy) Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 07:22:48 -0700 I would concur with just about everything Ellen says except for 6(c) -- a left wing political victory in the U.S. You can have all sorts of political destabilization short of a left wing victory. Further, it shouldn't be too controversial to note that the political stability that has reigned in the US over the past quarter century has been purchased at the cost of excluding important sectors, interests and voices from the political process. This was the declared and implemented intention of policies aimed at curbing what Crozier, Huntington and Watnuki diagnosed in the 1970s as an excess of democracy. If you think of the moderation of democracy in the U.S. as its tri-lateralization, it makes a perfect complement to the international ruling class's preference for holding U.S. dollars. The little matter of the 2000 presidential election, the Florida vote count and the Supreme Court decision has disappeared from the radar screen. But I would maintain that it constituted the apogee of the courtly political stability in the U.S.A. Ellen Frank wrote, (6) Threats to the dollar and ability of the US to finance its deficit could arise from three sources: (a) the emergence of a new superpower whose global corporations do not rapidly become Americanized. Not so very long ago everyone thought Japan and the yen would take this role, but Japanese MNC's just merged and forged partnerships with US MNCs. This might be because the US provides Japan's national defense (b) foreign governments are somehow able to compel their wealthy to bring the wealth home. This could occur through left wing coups -- siezing assets; or right-wing coups -- fascistic alliances between national governments and domestic businesses to rebuild the nation-state. (c) a left wing political victory in the US. A Nader victory would have tumbled the dollar. All three of these seem pretty unlikely to me, at least in the next few years. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
As the dust clears
The other twin towers that collapsed tuesday were market orthodoxy and high-tech idolatry. I'm seeing reports of massive coordinated central bank intervention to forestall financial panic. I cannot imagine a quick return to 'normalcy'. It is likely that without the terror attacks, at best economic recovery from the slowdown would have been shallow and painfully slow. At worst was the possibility of a severe and prolonged world recession/depression. Now it is unequivocally in the hands of the central authorities. If this is war; it is above all war economy. War economy is command economy. Mobilization of the economy for war against terrorism will not be left to an invisible hand. The immediate response has been the injection of liquidity into financial markets. The next step appears to be the emergency authorization of whatever level of federal spending on security and defense infrastructure is needed to offset the decline in consumer spending. Presumably, a third step will soon become necessary to prevent strategic supply bottlenecks and price gouging as consumption patterns jolt from consumer baubles to security staples. In all likelyhood, NMD will survive symbolically, but only symbolically. The real mobilization will have to be the labour intensive mobilization of a population. Spin doctors and high-tech toys are effective only in the de-mobilization of a population. If the U.S. government thinks an anti-terrorism war can be put on cruise-control, it is cruising for a bruising. In case anyone missed the point, high technology is too vulnerable and those who rely excessively on high-tech are made as vulnerable. This is even before factoring in the commercial and intellectual property parasitism of planned obsolesence, over-booking etc. Figuratively speaking, the terrorists simultaneously hacked several high-technology reliant systems: air transport, financial transactions and structural engineering. One must assume that as the U.S. declares war on terrorism, the enemy will not simply evaporate but will seek to identify and incapacitate other vulnerable systems. It is hard for me to imagine being for or against what seems to be eerily inevitable. Is one for or against a volcano or an iceberg? There will be a military response. The sovereignty of the U.S. has unquestionably been violated. I cannot help but think, though, that militarily responding to the events of September 11 will require a level of concrete and frankly collectivist thinking that is totally at odds with the abstract laissez faire solipsism of the past two decades. Video game surgical strikes won't cut it. Trying to have all the guns and all the butter too won't cut it. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: the attack
Andrew Hagen wrote, I disagree. IMHO, the attack was cowardly. They attacked defenseless people. Only cowards do such things. Zombies. Only zombies do such things. They didn't attack defenseless people per se; they attacked what were to them abstract symbols -- targets. Even the people were abstract symbols to the zombies. They performed the same kind of operation that other symbolic analysts do every day. Do we call T.V. news anchors cowards? Do we call downsizing CEO's cowards? Do we call welfare-to-work legislators cowards? Fighting back against cowards is easy. Call them names. Nothing hurts a coward more than calling him or her a coward to his or her face. This is why cowards prefer to remain faceless. For emphasis, try fucking coward. That really hurts 'em. Better yet, scurry off to Nebraska until the coast is clear, then call them cowards. Remember, when they taunt you with that old 'sticks and stones' routine, that they're only fooling themselves. Fighting back against zombies is hard. Calling them names leaves no impression. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Recession May Hit World Economy
LONDON (Reuters) - The shock to financial markets from Tuesday's devastating plane attacks in the United States could have huge repercussions for an already-fragile world economy, stunned analysts said as they watched events unfold. - We have to assume that quite a lot of high producers in the financial markets have been killed and won't be easily replaced,'' said McWilliams. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: quick thoughts before I rush off
Michael Perelman wrote, This morning's events will spell the end of much of our remaining civil liberties. I assume that Bush will get whatever spending he wants for a response. The U.S. has a record of lashing out at the wrong targets -- for example, the Sudan pharmaceutical plant. This is unquestionably true. Kiss your civil liberties goodbye, folks. The other side of the coin is that the repression can't be carried out on the basis of business as usual. Hello, Mars; Goodbye, Pluto. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: airlines and privatization
Bill Rosenberg wrote, A wonderful example of how privatised companies (Air New Zealand) are run so much better than state-owned ones and are no longer a drain on the state ... Good news (for me). These days I specialize in consulting on seniority integration for the labour unions at merged airline -- dovetails r us. I could use an antipode holiday about now. G'day, mates. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: liberty
Non-disposable time would be the amount of labour time socially necessary to produce goods sufficient for subsistence, reproduction of the working population and a reserve fund to replace worn out means of production. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
re: Beyond Kyoto or, goodbye 'sustainable development'
the book's scope clear: Working Less, Consuming Less, and Living More; Work-time Reduction and an Expansionary Vision; Why It's So Hard to Work Less; Work-time Policy and Practice, North and South; Europe's New Movement for Work-time Reduction; and With or without Loss of Pay? With or without Revolution? It is outside the scope of the book to provide a history of the struggle for the shorter work dayfor that, in the United States, see Roediger and Foner's Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (pp. 4449.) But Hayden does trace some important voices who have spoken out for work-time reduction over the past two centuries. This enriches his argument and provides a brief background for the reader new to the issue of work-time reduction. For readers more conversant with the issue, the long chapter on steps taken by European countries for reducing hours of work will be very useful, as it goes into great detail on what is happening now outside the United States. France, where a series of laws over the past 10 years have made real changes in work time, gets 11 pages of reporting. Germany, where changes have come more through collective bargaining, also gets full coverage, as do the Netherlands, Denmark, and other European countries. In short, Sharing the Work is engaging reading for both specialists and neophytes. And as concern with global warming takes its place on the international agenda, Hayden's book provides an input to the discussion from a different perspective than the usual tax and carbon-trading schemes being put forward. Not that Hayden ignores environmental taxes as an alternative to his preferred solution, for he covers those as well. The final chapter, With or without Loss of Pay? With or without the Revolution is a very thoughtful analysis of the conflicts between labor and capital, and offers ways to reduce those conflicts while still achieving the reduction in working hours that Hayden advocates. This is a very rich book, the product of a writer steeped in the literature and the political debates about work-time reduction, a writer who treats generously those with whom he disagrees by carefully and fairly making their arguments before offering his own. The book has extensive notes and a useful, though not exhaustive, bibliography. Eugene Coyle Eco-Economics Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
re: Welfare can't be abolished until unemployment is abolished
. . . and unemployment can't be abolished until capitalism is abolished. Jobless Rate Surges to 4-Year High By Caren Bohan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. unemployment rate soared to a four-year high in August as companies hacked 113,000 workers from their payrolls, the government said on Friday in a startlingly bleak report on the economy. The jobless rate climbed to 4.9 percent from 4.5 percent in July, the Labor Department said. August's big drop in the number of workers on nonfarm payrolls followed a revised payrolls gain of 13,000 in July that was originally reported as a loss of 42,000 jobs. Job losses in August were especially steep in the beleaguered manufacturing sector, which has shed more than a million positions since the middle of last year. A big worry among economists was that the higher jobless rate might deal a crushing blow to consumers, whose spending has held up an otherwise fragile economy. ``It builds the story toward a recession,'' said Mike Niemira, economist at Bank of Tokyo/Mitsubishi in New York. ``I think we are in a recession.'' Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
re: important news!
Jim Devine quoted Slate, A USAT insider reports that a Georgia state legislator said in a speech during a House session that she has achieved psychic contact with Chandra Levy. I say it's hearsay. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
35-hour week puts French hospitals at risk
Talk about a headline writer with an ax to grind! This story reports on how the 35-hour week brings to a head an already existing problem with the organization and staffing of French hospitals. It fails to mention that the same problems are endemic in North America, where the 35-hour week plays no role. The real headline should be Overtime permits administrators to sweep staffing crisis under the rug. 35-hour week puts French hospitals at risk Jon Henley in Paris Thursday September 6, 2001 The Guardian Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
re: liberty
read on the subject, the richest nations in the world are those where the greatest revenue is or can be raised; 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. On difficulty and novelty: Chastellux: As this truth results from very extensive principles, I cannot dispense with the necessity of explaining them. They belong to the science of Economicks; a science equally difficult, and obscure; to define it, hath been the business of multitudes; but to agree to those definitions the lot of few. These principles will, then, have some merit, should they prove true, and clear: and I dare flatter myself that, in spite of the quantity of writings, which have appeared on this subject, they will not be destitute of novelty. It is indeed a cold and dry discussion; but I should be guilty of injustice to the age in which I live, and to my readers, were I to feel an inclination to avoid it. Source and Remedy: I was confirmed in this intention [i.e., addressing the letter to Lord Russell] by an Essay, in a work generally attributed to your Lordship, wherein you acknowledge the little satisfaction you have hitherto received from the contradictory opinions of writers on this subject. They are indeed, my Lord, contradictory, not only the one to the other, but to our best feelings and plainest sense. How far my own opinions will be conclusive with your Lordship's, I dare not hazard a conjecture; but as many of them are uncommon, they may, as Hume says, 'repay some cost to understand them.' But, my Lord, if they are true, they have most important consequences; I therefore earnestly intreat you not to reject them without a patient and attentive examination. In the consideration of this important question, we must advert to and reason from principles; I shall proceed therefore immediately to lay down such as are of immediate consequence to the argument. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: productivity happy labor day!
Or, maybe what economists really mean (although they don't know it) is literally an increase in the rate of surplus value. See Marc Linder's From Surplus Value to Unit Labor Costs: The Bourgeoisification of a Communist Conspiracy in his _Labor Statistics and Class Struggle_. Linder tells the tale of the peregrination of an American Federation of Labor resolution to link wage increases to productivity gains to a Marxist statistical analysis (by Juergen Kuczynski in the 1920s) in support of that resolution to a business argument that wages must not exceed productivity gains to a status quo policy regime that productivity gains must precede and exceed even nominal wage increases. Jim Devine wrote, [COMMENT: I've decided that in common parlance, even among economists (who should know better), productivity is usually mixed up with profitability. So when the economists say they want increased productivity, they mean they want businesses' bottom lines to be doing better. This confusion arises in two main ways (besides the muddle-headedness of orthodox economics). First, rising labor productivity growth rates do NOT prevent inflation if workers get nominal wage gains in step with labor productivity. Economists assume -- and hope -- that wages won't do so, i.e., that profitability will rise. Also, note that increases in productivity growth can hurt recovery: if wages fall behind productivity, that hurts consumer spending (all else equal) relative to output. If fixed investment is stalled (along with other sources of aggregate demand), that hurts aggregate demand. If profitability rises, it's possible that fixed investment could get out of its stall. [Second, economists talk about the disgustingly crude concept of total factor productivity (output divided by the weighted sum of capital services and labor services). Not only are the components of the denominator almost impossible to measure, but they are weighted according to what they are paid in the national income product accounts (assuming that capital and labor are paid according to their contribution!) What's left -- the residual -- is mostly profits. So when total factor productivity goes up, so does the profit rate.] Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
U.S. popular culture
I thought it was because U.S. popularculture has an affinity for the image of the misfit or rebel. Maybe that same affinity helps explain the traditional inefficacy of oppositional politics in the U.S. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
35-hour French surpass overworked US in productivity
The NYT article below buries its lead in paragraph 13: But partly because of the comparatively high number of hours that Americans work, the report found that France and Belgium edged out the United States in productivity per hour. In France, which ranked first, workers produced $33.71 of value added per hour on average, compared with $32.98 in Belgium and $32.84 in the United States. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/01/national/01HOUR.html?todaysheadlines New York Times: September 1, 2001 Report Shows Americans Have More 'Labor Days' By STEVEN GREENHOUSE United Nations agency provided some discouraging news yesterday to Americans who believe they are overworked, finding that American workers have increased their substantial lead over Japan and all other industrial nations in the number of hours worked each year. The report, issued by the International Labor Organization, found that Americans added nearly a full week to their work year during the 1990's, climbing to 1,979 hours on average last year, up 36 hours from 1990. That means Americans who are employed are putting in nearly 49 1/2 weeks a year on the job. . . . Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: He's not God after all!
The humble part: We have to admit we know less about things than we thought we did, said Martin Regalia, chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Nevertheless, the we that knows less than they thought they did still assumes they know more than the them who never presumed to know so much. There is a fixed amount of hubris. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: USA workaholics [or, the invisible hand of vicarious sloth]
The real news story here is France surpassing the USA in hourly productivity. The overworked American is yesterday's papers. The NYTimes buries what should be its lead in paragraph 13. The NAM spokesman spins a slender good-news story out of a thick dark cloud for the American Way. France surpassing the USA in hourly productivity makes sense intuitively if you think about how the statistical series are composed. Hourly productivity is output divided by hours worked. The result varies inversely with the size of the denominator. The problem with conventional political economy, both mainstream and heterodox, is the implicit assumption that maximizing aggregate output is, for all intents and purposes, equivalent to optimizing it. The assumption simplifies things radically and facilitates all sorts of seemingly profound econometric analyses. Not only are maximizing and optimizing not equivalents, in many circumstances the maxima are suboptimal in the extreme. Think of obesity or alcohol consumption, for example. Composition is more important than quantity. The output per hour figures are consequently more significant than the output per person figures. Still more significant would be a breakdown of the output per hour into life enhancing versus destructive and/or restorative output (the Genuine Progress Indicator angle). The entire process can be greatly simplified by applying the maxim that wealth is disposable time. (see http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/dispose.htm). In that anonymously published phrase can be found the inspiration for Marx's development of the concept of labour power, as distinct from labour. I suspect also that the central argument in the anonymous 1821 pamphlet was also, in turn, influenced by a book on public happiness by the 18th century French immortal Chastellux. The happiness in question would be of a type that one might pursue, as in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So, maybe if the French are doing it better than the USAnians it's because it was their idea in the first place. By the way, there is an ironic episode in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he depicts the pursuit of leisure as leading to a 'happy' excess of industriousness, suggesting, perhaps that vicarious sloth is the invisible hand that guides the overachiever. Speaking of productivity, Lawrence earlier wrote [in Re: pre-Keynsian]: I've read that during the 60s for every 1% increase in productivity, workers got a 1.5% increase in wages. This extra .5% must have come from the pockets of the capitalists, yes? If not, what have I misunderstood? The basis for the above claim is change in the Unit Labor Cost. Unit Labor Cost, however, is an asymetrical ratio -- wages are calculated in nominal terms and output in real terms. When both wages and output are reported in real terms, Real Unit Labor Cost is more noticably cyclical in it's behavior. RULC declined over much of the post WWII period and only moved up slightly during the booms of the 1950s and 1960s -- it more than made up for this gain in the slumps of the late 1950s and early 1970s. See Marc Linder, From Surplus Value to Labor Costs in _Labor Statistics and Class Struggle_, International Publishers. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: He's not God after all!
I wrote, There is a fixed amount of hubris. Jim Devine asked, is this the lump of hubris fallacy? Almost, except it is not a fallacy. Maybe it's a phallusy. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Death by the numbers: from the abstract to the concrete
the poor? Increasingly, we are seeing a direct relationship between such policies and the increased criminalization of the most marginalized, especially young, racialized and poor women ... This is a significant part of the reason that we, the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, have joined with the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres to host the October 1-3, 2001 conference, Women's Resistance: From Victimization to Criminalization. These issues and welfare policies will be part of the overall conference agenda. More info is available via our website and although we are organizing with virtually no resources, what we do have, we are using to subsidize the most dispossessed to participate -- starting with women in and from prisons and shelters. Come join us in the struggle against the attacks on the poor and criminalization of the most dispossessed! Kim Pate Executive Director Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies (CAEFS) #701, 151 Slater Street Ottawa, Ontario K1P 5H3 Canada Telephone: (613) 238-2422 Mobile: (613) 298-2422 Facsimile: (613) 232-7130 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: www.elizabethfry.ca Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Fwd: Kimberly Rogers CBC radio interview
... [ban on welfare receipt]. Let's take a look at house arrest. What does house arrest mean? Who is responsible for Kimberly? She's still in custody. When she's on house arrest, she's still in custody per se, you know ... and house arrest. So I think that needs to be looked at more. TMc: How could the provincial government in Ontario have better handled this case? AT: More supervision. More supervision. There's a woman who had no income coming in and placing her under house arrest with basically no roof over her head. None of the shelters could have taken her here. They didn't look at the situation. They make these rules and this legislation ... they have no idea what it's like for people who have no income and are living so marginally. They don't realize. Then they complain because they are breaking laws or they are working the streets or stuff like that. You know? Reality. Get out there and look at what's really going on. TMc: She fought back against this legislation. Do you feel that her efforts against it and now perhaps her death may in the end have achieved something? AT: There was a good chance she was going to win the charter challenge. There was a good chance of it. There were other people coming forward who had been put on the lifetime ban who were going to offer their support and tell their stories. Well ... unfortunately now I don't think it's going to go through. It can't go through the system because of her death ... But ... this is all very new. The implications of this legislation are just coming known so maybe it can be investigated more, you know? TMc: Ms. Tadura. Thanks so much for your time on this. AT: You're welcome. Barbara Budd: Amanda Tadura is with the Elizabeth Fry Society in Sudbury. We tried to reach Ontario's Minister of Social Services to speak to him about the Rogers case but he wasn't available, but in a prepared statement the Ministry's officials said they are saddened by the tragedy; however they say they have to determine the facts before they comment. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: The right to read ... may be slipping away
Yesterday, I bought a new notebook computer and today I am ecstatic -- because I took the damned thing back for a full refund! The totalitarian impulse of Microsoft is hideous, vile and unrelenting. Yesterday, I was grousing with the clerk in the software department about the MS's outrageous bundling, forced obsolescence and obscene pricing and the clerk offered to make me a copy of his StarOffice Suite for free. He also observed that sales of Office XP were not doing well. Reportedly MS Office accounts for somewhere between 30% and 40% of MS revenues. The least we can do is boycott this tyranny. We are rapidly moving towards the scenario described in RMS' [Richard Stallman, originator of the Gnu free software movement] short-story Right to Read. But RMS was an optimist. The real world is moving both more quickly and much more aggressively. Here is a quote from the Microsoft Surveilance System: Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
XP?
Doesn't the XP stand for Windows eXPires? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Argentina
Many economists say, The current troubles stem in part from the faulty implementation of free market policies, many economists say, including runaway public spending and pervasive corruption. Strike the word faulty. Compare: In Empire corruption is everywhere. It is the cornerstone and keystone of domination. It resides in different forms in the supreme government of Empire and its vassal administrations, the most refined and the most rotten police forces, the lobbies of the ruling classes, the mafias of rising social groups, the churches and sects, the perpetrators and persecutors of scandal, the great financial conglomerates, and everyday economic transactions. Through corruption, imperial power extends a smoke screen across the world, and command over the multitude is exercised in this putrid cloud, in the absence of light and truth. -- Hardt and Negri, Empire. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Brekky table gossip
Looks like a silly right-wing site. Featured with the Greenspan rumour is Friday's Dresdner bank forecast of a 1.5% productivity revision. The productivity revision is out and it's 2.5%. So much for the Apocalyse. Maybe some folks went on a shorting binge and are hoping to start a stampede before they get trampled going the other way? A site called newsmax.com is running a story titled Greenspan Reportedly To Quit which claims that administration sources have said that Greenspan will retire by year-end. Briefing.com has never heard of newsmax.com and, needless to say, this is an unlikely place to find such a scoop. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Brekky table gossip
Jim Devine wrote, and why do these financial whizzes care about a statistic for only one quarter, one that will likely be revised within the next year or so? (See Dean Baker's comment on these stats, how revisions make the New Economy look more paltry.) They deserve their fate if they are so superficial. The revision was for the 1996-2000 period. Your comment on superficiality still holds, though. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: 24/7 (promiscuous labour)
Ian Murray mused, Wonder what Marx would've made of speed limits to info production per unit of time? He might have muttered something about absolute and relative surplus value and the physiological and class struggle limits to the production thereof. Then he might have gone on to suggest some sort of resolution about the limitation of the working day being a preliminary condition for emancipation. The 24/7 motif is a subjective experience. People may be working ten hours a day and doing five hours worth of work. They may be getting paid for zero, two, five, ten or a hundred thousand hours. I think a good term for this would be promiscuous labour -- an orgy of working. And whaddaya know, whaddaya know, the Greek orgia meaning secret rites is akin to ergon meaning work. (Does this have anything to do with union-busting rite to work legislation?) You work your fingers to the bone and what do you get? BONEY FINGERS! Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
The TimeWork Web restored
Last week the server that hosts my TimeWork Web crashed its hard drive and deleted the web files. I restored the website today and gave it a minor facelift. The TimeWork Web has been online since June 1995 as a repository of narrative analysis on working time. http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm TEASER: Match the following sources and quotes A. Wealth is liberty -- liberty to seek recreation -- liberty to enjoy life -- liberty to improve the mind: it is disposable time, and nothing more. B. The limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive. C. On the side of the working population there can be no question respecting the desirability of fewer hours, from every standpoint. D. The general conclusion is manifest that progress may be expected to be accompanied by a progressive curtailment of the working day. 1. The International Congress of Working Men 2. The classical (marginalist) statement of the theory of hours of labor 3. Anonymous 1821 pamphleteer 4. Report of a U.S. congressional commission on labor (Answer at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm) Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: 24/7
In his last dispatch from Washington Martin Kettle reflects on the one thing he won't miss - America's love affair with 24/7. In the view of this old hand, the price of admission to post-modernity may be had for close attention to less than a dozen pages of the Grundrisse, namely pages 704 to 714 of the Vintage edition. In those pages there are mysteries within mysteries that might take a pretty comprehensive understanding of Das Kap. to unravel. But the outline is there, dense as it is. I hesitate to mention (because you will wrongly suppose that I'm kidding) that those ten pages can be summarized in a four word inversion of Benjamin Franklin's injunction that time is money: wealth is disposable time. If I could cut and paste from the .pdf copy of Empire, I would send you pages 401 to 403 where Hardt and Negri try to say the same thing in several hundred times as many words. The best they can come up with is: The progressive indistinction between production and reproduction in the biopolitical context also highlights once again the immeasurability of time and value. As labor moves outside the factory walls, it is increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction of any measure of the working day and thus separate the time of production from the time of reproduction, or work time from leisure time. There are no time clocks to punch on the terrain of biopolitical production; the proletariat produces all its generality everywhere all day long. Which is to say, wealth is disposable time. 24/7 is the negation of disposable time and thus *value* at this late and lamentable stage is the negation of *wealth*. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: 24/7
At 04:30 PM 08/05/01 -0700, Ian wrote: And what of pages 690-703, not to mention the rest of that book? With the exception of Condorcet, it's arguably the first stuff written on non-linearity in economics. No objection. I was just trying to pare it to the ab-so-lute minimum for the sufferers of eye strain. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Dresdner Bank: Repent, The End is Nigh!
Friday August 3, 4:54 pm Eastern Time Risks of a Equity Crash High-Dresdner NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. productivity revisions due on Tuesday could shatter the belief in the ``new paradigm'' economy where strong growth could live with low inflation, possibly triggering a U.S. stock market crash, a leading German-based investment bank predicted. Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein said in a note to clients that government revisions to U.S. output made last week meant past productivity readings would also have to be revised lower when they are released next Tuesday. Stocks are vulnerable as their valuations are partly based on the idea of profit-boosting high productivity, which measures output per hour of labor, the report added. Policy-makers including Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill have noted how high recorded productivity levels have attracted strong inflows of foreign capital into U.S. asset markets. Last week O'Neill said productivity gains justified the strength of the dollar, which hit a 15-year peak on a trade weighted basis last month. The global equity strategists at DrKW see the second-quarter reading for productivity, which measures output per hour worked, at a ``reassuring'' 1.7 percent versus a 1.2 percent fall in the first three months of 2001 But revisions to earlier readings of productivity, which underpinned a belief among investors that high growth without inflation was sustainable, will put a question mark against U.S. financial market valuations, DrKW said in the report dated Aug 1. ``The revisions to productivity next week will undoubtedly leave Mr. Greenspan looking very foolish,'' it said. ``Investing in the U.S. miracle will in retrospect be seen as a sick joke. The markets will be forced to confront this harsh reality on August 7,'' DrKW Global Equity Strategist Albert Edwards wrote. ``Make a date in your diary! The U.S. 'new paradigm' will then be officially revised away! The risks of an equity crash are high,'' he added. The term ``new paradigm'' arose to explain the fact that strong U.S. economic growth during the 1990s failed to trigger inflation. Many economists credited a rise in productivity, based on technology, which allowed businesses to produce more without raising costs. This helped drive up stock markets because investors believed corporate profits could grow at a faster pace than in the past. But Edwards predicted revisions included in the second quarter productivity data will knock a full percentage point off longer-term estimates of productivity growth. He said trend productivity growth could be closer to 1.5 percent than the 2.5 percent many now predict. Because earnings estimates are based on a 2.5 percent rate, Edwards said the equity market is vulnerable. The Commerce Department announced revisions to U.S. growth back to 1998, notably cutting 2000 growth from 5 percent to 4.1 percent. High productivity and the ``new paradigm'' economy were used by many economists to explain the strong growth and low inflation in the United States in the last few years of the 1990s. But productivity skeptics said the miracle was merely a mirage and was due to weak growth in other parts of the world that depressed prices of commodities like oil. OTHER ECONOMISTS CAUTIOUS Other investment banks take a more cautious line on the impact of the downward growth revisions. ``Despite this, we remain convinced that the ``new-paradigm'' is still alive and kicking -- just to a smaller degree than initially,'' Lehman Brothers economists wrote in a research note. Lehman estimates productivity averaged 0.3 percentage point less over the last three years than previously reported as a result of the growth revisions. Goldman Sachs wrote on Monday: ``The short-term news on productivity should become a little less dismal. Given the information currently available on output and hours, we estimate that nonfarm labor productivity grew about 1.5 percent (annualized) in the second quarter.'' But Goldman economists added: ``A lower rate of return and increased downward pressure on investment imply that the fundamental outlook for capital deepening -- which measures the contribution of investment to productivity growth -- has deteriorated further. This suggests that our below-consensus estimate of 2.25 percent for the long-term productivity trend might still be too optimistic.'' Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Genoa and Beyond II: The View from the Peanut Gallery
Max Sawicky wrote, you'll have to bring this down from poetry to prose for the more dense among us. Ian Murray wrote, He's talking about the big, bad wolf, Little Red Riding Hood. You better believe it's the big, bad wolf. But who and what is the big bad wolf? Death? Living unloved? Making a fool of one's self? Getting a haircut and smiling through yet another fucking interview only to be told for the umpteenth time that you're too innovative and creative to be saddled with a steady paycheque? In prose, what I'm trying to say is that the real fears are too obvious for either the cult followers or the protesters to address. Both apocalyptic ballet and power shopping are trivial distractions, but the point is they do distract. When they are over they leave an emptyness that can only be filled by more of the same. The political economy runs on fear. But as Roosevelt said there is nothing to fear but fear itself, which would be a disaster for the political economy. So Bastiat and Hazlitt are wrong after all. The broken window is the thing that keeps the ball rolling. No, it doesn't add to output but it preserves the spectre of scarcity and it is that spectre that makes whatever the hell the output is never enough. The day will come when there are no more farmers or tailors or carpenters. Only glaziers, security guards, rock throwers, glass sweepers, bankruptcy lawyers, media commentators and political economists, drunken tanker captains, public relations agents, cappucino baristas, basketball stars, rock musicians, pyramid salesmen, gurus, corporate lobbyists and anti-corporate counter-lobbyists. On that fine sabbath day, we can thank God for all the labour-saving technology He hath wrought but we better not take the day off or we'll fall behind the competition and we'll starve, go naked and be homeless. Amen. Glossary Amen: a primeval Egyptian deity, worshiped, esp. at Thebes, as the personification of air or breath and represented as either a ram or a goose wolf: to devour voraciously wrought: archaic past participle of work Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
RE: Genoa and Beyond II: The View from the Black Bloc
Ian Murray asked, So is the lump-of-labor the Absolute? Absolute-ly. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
RE: Genoa and Beyond II: The View from the Black Bloc
David Shemano asked, As the resident reactionary, I have to ask, does this mean that the anarchists do not do readings of Bastiat and Henry Hazlitt at their strategy sessions? As the resident non-reactionary, non-anarchist reader of Henry Hazlitt and Bastiat, I am sorry to confirm David's suspicion that anarcho-strategic thinking is deficient in its study of and respect for the enemy. If leftistes would only read Hazlitt and Bastiat, they would suddenly realize whence comes the seemingly bottomless vault of plagiarism and posturing that passes itself off in the newsmedia as commentary. The broken window fable is part and parcel of the luddism/lump-of-labour refrain. It is the bulwark defence of the mainstream cult. It is a clever concoction of half-truths, straw men and abstract theorizing posing as empirical fact. It is absolutely, unquestionably true that a broken window doesn't contribute one iota to the welfare of the community through its role as a job creation project. Nor, it should be remembered, does an oil tanker spill or the subsequent public relations campaign to make people forget about it. But, contrary to the Hazlitt/Bastiat dictum, not every technological advance contributes to the welfare of the community either. There is a much more complex balance of livelyhoods and relationships at stake than can be answered by the formula, more stuff is better. Blind worship of the supply side is no less blind than blind worship of demand management. Nothing personal, David, but we have designed a system that routinely puts farmers out of work, so why can't we do the same for lawyers? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: A Death in Genoa (Re: Genoa and Beyond II: The View from the Black Bloc
It is not just discipline that is lacking. It is also strategy. The globalization protests are like a dog chasing a car. What would they do with it if they caught it? Nathan writes about the protesters, the police, the elites and the media as if they are the actors in the drama. The public makes a cameo appearance as spectators: much of the public shrugged and washed their hands, the sympathies the public often has with the police, an angry mirror to the consumerist individualism of those who shop there. Ah, but the mirror faces the other way. It is the protesters, cops, elites and commentators who are the spectators and the shrugging, shopping masses who are the spectacle. Is this any way to run a Salt March? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Genoa and Beyond II: The View from the Black Bloc
Steve Diamond wrote, A few days ago I posted a brief critique of the direct action and anarchist elements' role in the anti-globalization movement. The following defense of the tactics of the Black Bloc is being circulated by sympathizers with this milieu. As a law professor I can only add: res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself). Mary Black's defense is articulate and plausible. I don't agree with the tactics, but her analysis of the media and the ineffectuality of peaceful protest is at least superficially compelling. Steve Diamond's arguments for defeating the violent tactics are also superficially compelling. I refuse to be superficially compelled. It seems to me that it is the responsibility of those who disapprove of violent tactics to come up with tactics that build an effective movement, not simply critique tactics that lead to a dead end. It is not enough to have progressive views and engage in symbolic protests that change nothing. It is not enough to organize workshops and discussions that only lead to a *different* dead end. Breaking windows is violent. It doesn't matter who owns the window. The window is part of public space. Breaking windows is also incoherent. If it gets on the mainstream news, that is because the news is incoherent. If the violent, incoherent actions of a minority discredit the legitimate peaceful protest of the majority that is largely because the legitimate protest is itself incoherent. Such legitimate protest is, therefore, not legitimate. Steve Diamond meet Mary Black. Mary Black meet Steve Diamond. Say cheese. What is the nature of the beast we are up against? It is a cult. The scary thing about Lyndon LaRouche, L. Ron Hubbard or Reverend Sun Myung Moon is that they each make at least as much sense as Dick Cheney or Tom Brokaw. The really scary thing about the mainstream cult is that it is hydra-headed. The really, really scary thing is that it isn't feasible to cut off the heads and sear the stumps. Forget Heracles. Are we getting any clues yet? The really, really, really scary thing is that it isn't the cult leaders who are the scary things. It's the cult members who may very well be trapped inside something they don't want to be in. They're scary because they're scared. What are the members of the mainstream cult afraid of? What are YOU afraid of? What am I afraid of? The G8? The WTO? The IMF? Globalization? The cops? The Black Bloc? The Almighty Dollar? The Apocalypse? nope Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Krugman: Dollar as Ponzi scheme
Krugman wrote, blah, blah . . . the dollar's inevitable decline . . . blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . . the Ponzi scheme is about to run out of suckers. blah, blah, blah, blah But would a sharp drop in the dollar be a catastrophe? Probably not. blah, blah, blah blah, blah . . . the great dollar decline is coming, and we should welcome its arrival. So long sad times!, Go 'long bad times!, We are rid of you at last Howdy, gay times! Cloudy gray times, You are now a thing Of the past, cause: Chorus: Happy days are here again, The skies above are clear again, Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy days are here again! All together, shout it now, There's no one who can doubt it now, So let's tell the world about it now, Happy days are here again! Your cares and troubles are gone, There'll be no more from now on; Happy days are here again, The skies above are clear again, Let us sing a song of cheer again, Happy days are here again! (recorded 11/20/29) Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Volcker summarises situation
Michael Perelman wrote, I see this quote on some stock market oriented web site, but I was unable to discover a source. Is this an urban legend quote? Most free-floating quotes are. What often happens is somebody says blah, blah, blah, but the person quoting the original forgets the name of who actually said it and substitutes a better-known authority. If the quote lasts long enough it will be attributed to Mark Twain someday. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Lust, longing and labour
Three days ago, I received a book in the mail called The Four-Hour Day. It was a self-published, semi-autobiographical utopian novel sent as a gift by the author, Gabe Sinclair, a Baltimore machinist. Besides writing the book and publishing it himself, he even paid the $3.75 postage. One approaches such a gift with some trepidation. But as I stood at the mailbox flipping through the pages, I kept alighting on lines that delighted and surprised me with their craft, humour and insight. By the time I had hiked back back up the hill to the house I had been shamed and seduced into at least reading the introduction. One thing led to another and I finished the entire 264-page novel by the next morning. As sometimes happens with literature, subtleties of the composition keep occuring to me as afterthoughts. One such subtlety is that the novel is constructed as a fugue. Did I say subtlety? On page 33, The narrator explains how the novel is constructed as a fugue. It just takes a while for it to sink in. It's too early to tell if this book will change my life. But it has changed my estimation of the possibilities of the utopian novel. In the past year I've read several dystopias and one utopia -- Bellamy's classic Looking Backward. I don't usually think of specimens of the genre as Literature with a capital 'l', more as long illustrated essays. The last dystopia I tried to read was Michael Young's 1958 The Rise of the Meritocracy. I found it unbearably tedious -- a clever notion tortured on the rack, a dissertation tattooed on a ventriloquist's dummy. The Four-Hour Day, by contrast, is a lyric poem peppered with prose meditations on everything from seed drills and eye contact to dialectic and god (with a lower case 'g' and no pronouns). It is no more utopian, in the generic sense, than breathing clean air. The central action in The Four Hour Day revolves around a voyage to the far future in a time machine. As the book's title suggests and the narrator confirms, I have seen the future, and it works less than we do. The inhabitants of Aurora, 2000 years hence work as little as they do because they actually enjoy it. But the action also revolves around the diaphanous distinction between lust and longing. Commercial culture (and I use the term culture advisedly) insists there really is no difference. The way to cut through the membrane of mystery and consumate our most intimate desires -- with no money down and easy payments on the installment plan -- is to treat the whole kit and caboodle unabashedly as lust. This also spares us the excruciating embarrassment of eye contact. Aurorans believe there is only eye contact. At this point you may justifiably be wondering what lust and longing have to do with the future of work and the length of the working day. The narrator offers a hint early in the story when he suggests a kind of vicious circle between sexual frustration and superfluous mechanical invention. But here he's laying down a false, Freudian scent. Repressive sublimation is, after all, not exactly a new idea. By the mid-1950s, Marcuse was already diagnosing the malady of repressive de-sublimation. Looking back over his Eros and Civilization after reading The Four-Hour Day shows it up for the idle prattle that it is. Words, good ideas and the U.S. Dollar weren't worth the paper they were printed on. The short answer is Sinclair doesn't pretend to have all the answers. In fact, the Aurorans themselves don't have all the answers and they know it. So where is the hope? What conceivable reason is there to wonder about the four-hour day when it's so hard to find anyone able to see us clearly? What Sinclair does have is a clear grasp of what the answers aren't and of the nature of the questions. The difficulty is that life, love and work are, like time, not linear. They can't simply be taken apart and put back together like a wrist watch. They have to be grasped together in all their complexity like a fugue. Or like a novel constructed as a fugue -- figuratively, a time machine. The Four-Hour Day is an example of the future it advocates. It is simultaneously both map and territory. It is literally a labour of love that patiently and attentively explores the relationship between work and eros. It is a gift. Continuing on our present course is out of the question so all we have to do is create an atmosphere of expectation. Nothing can be rushed. Everything happens right on schedule. The Four-Hour Day is available on-line at http://www.fourhourday.org as either an electronic file or in hard copy. Get the hard copy. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Hardt and Negri on Genoa
Does anyone know: are Nick Dyer-Witheford and Nick Witheford one person or two? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Kananaskis/Carlo Guiliani
Kananaskis: Captain John Palliser, an early explorer of the valley, identified the area by taking the name of a local Indian who had overcome some remarkable circumstances. Palliser had written that he had heard of an Indian named Kananaskis, giving account of most wonderful recovery from the blow of an axe to the head - which stunned, but failed to kill him. Carlo Giuliani: Yesterday, Tuesday 24 July 2001, thousands of youth, parents and trade unionists returned to the streets and squares of Italy to protest against the police brutality which led to the death of Carlo Giuliani in the Genoa protests against the G8 meeting. These demonstrations add a badly needed lease of life to a movement deeply shaken by the police brutality. The slogan in Genoa las night hit the nail on the head: Pensavate di averlo ucciso - Carletto vive attraverso di noi (You thought you'd killed him, but Carlo lives on through us). Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Hardt and Negri on Genoa
No, seriously. There is (or was?) a grad student then prof. in the communications department at SFU named Nick Witheford. He was a skinny Brit with black hair and was a marxist (or student of marx). The smiling photo of Dyer-Witheford on his U of Guelph home page doesn't look exactly like the characteristically grim-faced Nick I recall but close enough that it could possibly be him given an extra 20 years and tenure. Just curious. Does anyone know: are Nick Dyer-Witheford and Nick Witheford one person or two? I'm sure he's just him, Tom. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
The global fisc v. global risk (was Re: Jamie Galbraith)
Alex Izurieta wrote, Less unlikely, but not highly probable either, would be a sort of worldwide coordinated reflation. But _given the alternatives_ doesn't the normal improbability of such a response take on at least a more intense hue of possibility? The institutional skeleton is there, serving for the present the perverse purpose of structural adjustment. Given the role and position of the US dollar, the US cannot adjust its CAD either through deflation or devaluation. The logical alternative then is that everyone else adjust upward and the US rides in the caboose. The turnabout would of course have to be presented as a temporary response to an emergency. But once begun it would be awful hard to stop. The 1998-2000 bubble was the last best shot at stoking the US locomotive. Given that this time the contagion is emanating directly from the US and that it is a consequence of the build-up of tolerance to the last fix, it seems hard to imagine that the same magic could work again without an inflationary risk that would make the 1970s look like a bankers' picnic. We know one thing: business as usual ain't going to cut it. The probable is no longer possible. Whatever happens next is bound to be improbable. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Nice quote
For 10 points each: name the author and source of the following quote: For the minds of this generation are still so beclouded by bogus calculations that they distrust conclusions which should be obvious, out of a reliance on a system of financial accounting which casts doubt on whether such an operation will 'pay'. We have to remain poor because it does not 'pay' to be rich. We have to live in hovels, not because we cannot build palaces but because we cannot 'afford' them. The same rule of self-destructive financial calculation governs every walk of life. We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the unappropriated splendours of nature have no economic value. We are capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend. London is one of the richest cities in the history of civilisation, but it cannot 'afford' the highest standards of achievement of which its own living citizens are capable, because they do not 'pay.' Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Nice quote
Plus five bonus points for posting the answer within five minutes. Michael Perelman wrote, Keynes, 1933. National Self-Sufficiency. The New Statesman and Nation Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Nice Quote
25 extra credit points to Ian for tracking down the possible inspiration for Keynes' allusion. For all we know, Hobson may have gotten his inspiration from a similar sentiment in an anonymous pamphlet from the 1820s. Ian Murray quoted John Hobson It is the denial of this full property which starves our social life today. Look, for example, at the civic life of an average municipality in England, the richest country that the world has ever known. Is this civic life as strong, as rich, as it might be?...Are its streets, its public buildings worthy of a rich and civilised community? Is it not a commonplace that these external embodiments of our civic life are, in every quality of excellence, inferior beyond all comparison with the attainments of most of the great cities of antiquity, the private wealth of whose citizens was not one hundreth part as great as ours? (from John Hobson's The Social Problem) Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Is there a light at the end of the tunnel just around the corner?
I have a question. Inflation is tame; Greenspan said so. The US dollar is strong or was until Dubya started worrying out loud that it might be too strong. Does anyone have a handle on the extent to which the strong dollar has contributed to containing inflation through its impact on the dollar price of imports? Is the following scenario plausible: in response to low interest rates and low corporate earnings the dollar continues to ease off its recent 15 year high. Just as the U.S. economy bottoms out, inflation picks up reflecting the higher dollar price of imports. The fed is then faced with the dilemma of tolerating higher inflation (possibly further undermining the dollar) and keeping interest rates down or raising rates and aborting the recovery. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: The US Dollar (spend it fast as you can)
Seth Sandronsky asked, Tom, do you mean selling the growth is the problem, not the solution to what ails us message to the news media or to the general population? I mean the general public, the media, academics and policy elites (including progressive intellectuals). But the difficulties are of course different with each of the different groups. I agree that the public is open to the anti-growth message and that it is a challenge communicating with them outside of the mainstream media. Ironically, I find that what I would call progressive intellectuals tend to be receptive personally and skeptical of its broader appeal. Us progressive intellectuals are very ambivalent about our professional standing in the eyes of our (reactionary) peers. We tend to unthinkingly concede greater weight to the conventionally prestigious act. Every peer-reviewed, published article with equations in it adds to the weight of authority even if the equations are trivial nonsense. A million peer-reviewed, published articles with trivial nonsensical equations in them constitutes a scholarly field (I won't mention names). Somehow we feel that the way to refute those million trivial nonsensical equations is to publish a hundred thousand peer-reviewed articles with non-trivial sensical equations in them, as if reason will win out in a dialogue with unreason. I play that game, too. Maybe I do it to keep from having self-doubts about whether I _could_ do it. By the way, I think that the latter is open to your anti-growth message. But, communicating with them outside of the mainstream news media is quite a challenge. Consider the information the U.S. general population does get. Here's one example. The media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting did a study of U.S. TV coverage during the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign and found that it got less attention then the case of Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who lived briefly in Florida. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Fun with metaphors
Technically, O'Neill is absolutely correct in his allusion to as far into the future as the eye can see. The eye can see precisely zero distance into the future. Perhaps even his statement that things are going to be good is true, with a qualification. Things will be good, people will be mauled. O'Neill Predicts Strong U.S. Surpluses WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on Friday predicted strong future U.S. economic growth and substantial budget surpluses ``as far into the future as the eye can see.'' In an interview with NBC's ``Today'' show, O'Neill dismissed suggestions the United States' economy was in for a lengthy downturn. ``We are doing well and our economy is going to come back. We are going to restore ourselves to the growth path that we have experienced and things are going to be good,'' said O'Neill. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Pharaoh's Dream Re-engineered
Joseph: Seven years of market ups are on their way Years of plenty, tons of high tech play I.T. will boom, there won't be room To store the dot.com hype you grow After that, the future doesn't look so bright NASDAQ's luck will change completely overnight recession's hand will stalk the land With saving at an all-time low Noble king, there is no doubt What your dreams are all about All these things you saw in your pajamas Are a long range forecast for your commerce And I'm sure it's crossed your mind What it is you have to find Find a man to lead you through the famine With a flair for economic planning But who this man could be I just don't know Who this man could be I just don't know Who this man could be I just don't know It sure ain't Alan Greenspan Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
RE: the almighty dollar ( the crisis of democracy)
I would concur with just about everything Ellen says except for 6(c) -- a left wing political victory in the U.S. You can have all sorts of political destabilization short of a left wing victory. Further, it shouldn't be too controversial to note that the political stability that has reigned in the US over the past quarter century has been purchased at the cost of excluding important sectors, interests and voices from the political process. This was the declared and implemented intention of policies aimed at curbing what Crozier, Huntington and Watnuki diagnosed in the 1970s as an excess of democracy. If you think of the moderation of democracy in the U.S. as its tri-lateralization, it makes a perfect complement to the international ruling class's preference for holding U.S. dollars. The little matter of the 2000 presidential election, the Florida vote count and the Supreme Court decision has disappeared from the radar screen. But I would maintain that it constituted the apogee of the courtly political stability in the U.S.A. Ellen Frank wrote, (6) Threats to the dollar and ability of the US to finance its deficit could arise from three sources: (a) the emergence of a new superpower whose global corporations do not rapidly become Americanized. Not so very long ago everyone thought Japan and the yen would take this role, but Japanese MNC's just merged and forged partnerships with US MNCs. This might be because the US provides Japan's national defense (b) foreign governments are somehow able to compel their wealthy to bring the wealth home. This could occur through left wing coups -- siezing assets; or right-wing coups -- fascistic alliances between national governments and domestic businesses to rebuild the nation-state. (c) a left wing political victory in the US. A Nader victory would have tumbled the dollar. All three of these seem pretty unlikely to me, at least in the next few years. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: The US Dollar (spend it fast as you can)
The premise only supports the conclusion on the condition that hegemony is a zero-sum game. US drops ball; someone else picks it up. Uh-uh. Much more dangerous possibilities have presented in the past, such as during roughly the first half of the last century. In the hegemony sweepstakes nothing is something too. The USA entered into the twilight of empire between 1968 and 1974. Any semblances of glory since then have been mirages sustained by the obsequiousness of USA's partners and the relentlessness of the public relations campaign. Yoshie Furuhashi wrote, There's nothing on the political horizon to replace US hegemony -- therefore Ellen's dissertation on dollarization holds up, I think, despite the alarms sounded by Wynne Godley who writes as if the USA had already entered into the same twilight of the empire that the UK had earlier. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: The US Dollar (spend it fast as you can)
Jim Devine asked, you really think that we're could be moving toward a period such as 1910-45, in which nation-state contention among the rich capitalist powers led to trade wars and hot wars? do you have evidence? First question: No, that's not what I said and not also what I think. I said that hegemony isn't a zero sum game. My speculative worst-case scenario would not be nation-state contention among rich capitalist powers but synchronized institutional breakdowns within the various nation-states. The nearest parallel would be with the breakdown of the Warsaw pact countries in the late 1980s, with, of course, the difference that there wouldn't be a West on the outside egging the process on. So it could be much more protracted and ugly. Frankly, the other boot hasn't dropped yet from 1989. Despite all the fairy tales, it didn't turn into a glass slipper in the interim. Do I have evidence? Yes, I do. Plenty. It's anecdotal and I'm skeptical whether even that could be marshalled to be persuasive to anyone who doesn't already see (or think they see) the writing on the other side of the wall. Some of the evidence has to do with the proliferation of public travesties and the growing public insensibility to same. Speaking of saving, a line from a review of the book Affluenza mentions that our average rate of saving has fallen from about 10 percent of our income in 1980 to zero in 2000. That is, there is a cultural side to the economic dynamic that Godley and Izurieta call unsustainable. That cultural side is not ONLY unsustainable -- it is something we shouldn't want to sustain if we could. More evidence? In their eye-opening, soul-prodding look at the excess of American society, the authors of Affluenza include two quotations that encapsulate much of the book: T.S. Eliot's line We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men, which opens one of this book's chapters, and a quote from a newspaper article that notes We are a nation that shouts at a microwave oven to hurry up. If these observations make you grimace at your own ruthless consumption or sigh at the hurried pace of your life, you may already be ill. Read on. The definition of affluenza, according to de Graaf, Wann, and Naylor, is something akin to a painful, contagious, socially-transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more. It's a powerful virus running rampant in our society, infecting our souls, affecting our wallets and financial well-being, and threatening to destroy not only the environment but also our families and communities. Having begun life as two PBS programs coproduced by de Graaf, this book takes a hard look at the symptoms of affluenza, the history of its development into an epidemic, and the options for treatment. In examining this pervasive disease in an age when the urge to splurge continues to surge, the first section is the book's most provocative. According to figures the authors quote and expound upon, Americans each spend more than $21,000 per year on consumer goods, our average rate of saving has fallen from about 10 percent of our income in 1980 to zero in 2000, our credit card indebtedness tripled in the 1990s, more people are filing for bankruptcy each year than graduate from college, and we spend more for trash bags than 90 of the world's 210 countries spend for everything. To live, we buy, explain the authors--everything from food and good sex to religion and recreation--all the while squelching our intrinsic curiosity, self-motivation, and creativity. They offer historical, political, and socioeconomic reasons that affluenza has taken such strong root in our society, and in the final section, offer practical ideas for change. These use the intriguing stories of those who have already opted for simpler living and who are creatively combating the disease, from making simple habit alterations to taking more in-depth environmental considerations, and from living lightly to managing wealth responsibly. Many books make you think the author has crammed everything he or she knows into it. The feeling you get reading Affluenzais quite different; the authors appear well-read, well-rounded and intelligent, knowledgeable beyond the content of their book but smart enough to realize that we need a short, sharp jolt to recognize our current ailment. It's a well-worn cliché that money can't buy happiness, but this book will strike a chord with anyone who realizes that more time is more valuable than toys, and that our relentless quest for the latest stuff is breeding sick individuals and sick societies. Affluenza is, in fact, a clarion call for those interested in being part of the solution. --S. Ketchum Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: The US Dollar (spend it fast as you can)
Mark Jones wrote, Discussions about how to get growth back on track (seemingly an objective shared by many on pen-l) is actually discussion about how to turn the gas even higher. I agree that this is extremely important. Extremely is not sufficiently superlative. It is a matter of life or death on an unimaginable scale. If not now, then 10 years from now or 20. What difference does it make? Getting growth back on track is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic after it has struck (the rapidly melting?) iceberg. *Talking about getting growth back on track* is talking about rearranging deck chairs. Talking in the abstract about socialism and hegemony and the dollar while the recession runs its course is like talking about not-rearranging the deck chairs. How many times does the shit have to hit the fan before the fan-gazers notice there are feces all over their faces? What is necessary is a transitional strategy that can buffer some of the worst dislocations of the recession-cum-implosion while resisting the imperative of restarting growth. Difficult to sell to the mainstream? You bet. Finessing my own particular policy preference -- which I'm sure most on this list know by now -- what is necessary is the delinking of the necessities of life from the vagaries of the market. There are various ways to approach this but they all entail some kind of direct political guarantee not indirect interventions that are intended to achieve the same objectives through the medium of growth. As we have had most graphically demonstrated over the past two decades, economic growth is not a means to enable the nations to afford better housing, social programs and a more equitable distribution of income. Economic growth is an ideological program offered as a substitute for democracy, equality and social justice. FUCK GROWTH. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: The US Dollar (spend it fast as you can)
Ellen is partly right but she overlooks the circular nature of her case. The wealthy count their wealth in dollars because of the historical role that the US dollar achieved over many decades. A US current account deficit doesn't change that historical role overnight. A few decades of current account deficits, though, create the conditions where that historical role could abruptly change. Things continue on as they have because there is no alternative. At some point things can stop continuing on as they have, with or without an alternative, simply because there is no foundation for the way things have been continuing on. Ellen Frank wrote, I have to disagree with the proposition that the US current account deficit might presage flight from the greenback, capital outflows and financial collapse. Though the scenario is plausible on the surface, it overlooks one thing. Increasingly, the world's wealthy count their wealth in dollars. There is ample reason for this -- dollar-denominated financial markets are broad, deep and fully international; dollar-based multinationals represent the bulk of all MNC assets in which the rich hold their wealth; most of the developing world is starved for dollars, so extra-US dollar lending opportunities abound; etc... The significance of this is not simply that the demand for dollars will remain high (indeed the fact that the dollar is rising signifies that there is considerable excess demand for dollars). It also means that a sizable share of the world's wealth is held by people who figure in dollars -- they don't care about the dollar's value relative to the yen or euro or peso, because they've already written off the yen and euro and peso. This is why, despite occasional bouts of speculation and depreciation, the world's wealthy continue to hold dollars and the dollar share of international lending and reserves is increasing. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Reply to Tom Walker re PEN-L 15095
Eugene Coyle wrote, Having said that, I wonder if losing the family wage -- i. e. needing two wage earners to support a household that one wage earner once could isn't a claw-back on the part of capital. Any thoughts/statistics about that? Another name for the family wage would be the male breadwinner model, which also indicates its darker side. In the MBM, you still have two people working but one is either off the books and tied to a no-wage personal service contract or marginalized in the waged labour force. As for statistics, a lot depends on what source you use and how you slice it. As usual, I'd like to plug our book, Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives as containing a valuable survey of the statistics and various angles on them. For example, here is part of a table presented by Bluestone and Rose comparing education, and the percentage change in hours and earnings for US families between 1973 and 1988: Headed by HS dropouts HS grads BA+ Annual Hours 11.616.116.6 Real Earnings -8.2 3.732.5 family hourly wage -10.7 -11.513.6 In the Overworked American, Juliet Schor argued that total annual work hours (including both paid and unpaid time) are increasing, while Robinson and Godbey found that total workload fell between 1965 and 1985. Or is the need for two incomes driven by the mad consumerism upon which we embarked in the same early post-WWII period during which the family wage was eroded? There may be a method to the madness. In terms of a triumph of mass consumption, I would be inclined, along with Benjamin Hunnicutt, to locate it in the 1920s and 1930s. A lot of that has to do with consumption of public goods -- expanding public education, public health, highways etc. as well as public not-so-goods expenditures on military and policing (and more highways). Private mass consumerism could be seen as much as an outgrowth of trade union ideology as it was of commercial promotion. I'm thinking especially of the ideas of Ira Steward with regard to shorter hours, higher wages and consumer demand driven economic growth. These anticipated Keynes in some respects. In 1926, Henry Ford virtually declared himself a disciple of Ira Steward in the way that he explained why he had introduced the five-day workweek in his factories. I guess my point is that our chains today have been forged in partially victorious struggle, which sometimes makes it difficult to tell whether we are coming or going. What makes it even more difficult is a quite understandable human tendency to attribute all bad things to the evil machinations of the other side and to defend all past, provisional gains as if they were sacrosanct when in fact many of those gains have been compromises and many of those compromises have become successively more compromising. I would add another thought: Although it is by no means a sure thing, cutting working hours (eventually down to a few hours a week) could change the culture of consumption, so that our esteem could be gained otherwise than acquiring things. It being by no means a sure thing is probably why it's so hard to get on the policy agenda. Policy-makers and the opinionated public keep looking for sure things, even if those sure things have an appalling track record. GWB's big ticket policy initiatives are all sure things. Better to fail unambiguously than to succeed ambiguously. That ties your post and work back to the issue that Mark Jones addresses -- that the world can't go on with those in the North living as we do. And such a cultural shift would be an answer to Henwood who sees no hope that people won't go on buying till the oceans rise. This adds a new dimension to the expression, surf's up! It was plain in 1968, 1973, 1979, 1989, 1994 and 1998 that the world couldn't go on with those in the North living as we do. Yet the nettle remains virginally ungrasped. Unless, that is, one chooses to read the surrender to sheer fantasy as the sign of an underlying but perhaps incapacitating realism. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: The US Dollar (spend it fast as you can)
Rakesh Narpat Bhandari wrote, And the size of the CAD (and trade deficit) is not correlated with the value of the dollar; if it were there would be some reason to expect Tom W's scenario of an imminent mass dumping of dollars. Why does there seem to be no correlation? Ellen's analysis seems to provide an answer. The tag line spend it fast as you can was meant to allude to the line in the song, I don't give a damn about a greenback dollar, spend it fast as I can not to any conviction of mine that the demise of the dollar is imminent. If... IF... there is a mass dumping of dollars, the precipitating event will most likely NOT be the fundamentals of the dollar itself. My guess is it will probably not even be a financial event. The lack of correlation between current account deficit and value of the dollar has nothing to say about future events. In fact, the term correlation has no more scientific standing with regard to the issue than do the words to the song I cited. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: The US Dollar (spend it fast as you can)
Are you saying, then, that the absence of evidence is the same as evidence of absence? I guess I missed what the this refers to that you wrote your dissertation on. Ellen Frank wrote, Actually, I don't overlook this. In fact I wrote my dissertation on this and looked into the role of historical inertia quite closely and it doesn't hold up. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: protectionism
Michael Perelman wrote, If the US tried to use protectionism as a form for maintaining aggregate demand, wouldn't that throw fuel on the Argentinian/Turkish crisis? Doesn't the rest of the world economy depend on the US as the consumer of last resort? Would it be a bull in China shop? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
RE: wynne godley
Max Sawicky wrote, If the discussion is not fruitful, I'm sure it will be nutful. Beans are a fruit, aren't they? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Muppim, and Huppim, and Ard
And Ner begat Kish, and Kish begat Saul, and Saul begat Jonathan, and Malchishua, and Abinadab, and Eshbaal. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Speaking of volatility (Jones)
I appreciate very much what Doyle had to say about the listserv not functioning as a place for collaborative work. That gets closer to my point than what I actually said. In the past, I've made connections through Pen-l that have led to two major pieces of collaborative work and several other strands that fed into those two big ones. That makes it even more puzzling to me that the drift seems to be ever more toward tit-for-tat set pieces and arcane gossip. I would wonder why pen-l couldn't mature and possibly take stock of its own legacy and try to build on that. I think what Yoshie said, it goes without saying is apt. If you'll pardon the expression, it is also easier said than done. It is a discipline to train ourselves to say that which goes without saying. Only then will we discover why it has gone without saying. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Speaking of volatility (Hanly)
Ken Hanly asked: Do you have the figures? Why is this the case do u think? I guess my remark about the new Russian labor law is true though. The figures are in Labour Force Update, Hours of Work, Summer 1997 (StatsCan) and Report of the Advisory Group on Working Time and the Distribution of Work December 1994 (HRDC). See also the chapter by Lars Osberg in the Report of the Advisory Committee on the Changing Workplace, HRDC, 1997. The interpretation of the figures is mine although it borrows from analysis by a lot of other people. I would attribute much of the destandardization of working time to policy loopholes in the social security and employer-paid benefit tax structures and in labour standards legislation. Some of the usual suspect market factors that contribute to the destandardization of working time would include, on the labour demand side, lean production and just-in-time workforce management. On the labour supply side the contributing factors includes increased labour force participation of mothers of young children and students (more part-timers), and consumer culture and job loss fears (more overtime). There is some debate about to what extent the changes are driven by market supply factors, demand factors or by the policy regime. You can find most of the arguments -- including my own -- in Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives, edited by Lonnie Golden and Deborah Figart, Routledge, 2000. My own view is that the supply, demand and policy factors are all mutually re-inforcing so it would be very difficult to separate them out. That is to say, the structure of payroll taxes gives employers perverse incentives to use the labour force in a polarized way (more part-time, more temp, more overtime) and polarization in turn creates economic barriers to ameliorating the perverse policy. The economic barriers, I should point out, are short term. A comprehensive clean up of the toxic policy loopholes would have a salutory effect on labour productivity in the medium and long run. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Speaking of volatility (Jones)
I regret that Mark has piggy-backed blue-baiting of on top of my chiding. I share a number of Doug's cultural criticisms of the left. I don't think that makes me a Republican. My issue with Doug is that he makes his dour observations and then leaves it at that. The implication of the resulting void *could be* reactionary, but doesn't have to be so. Assuming that it *is* reactionary rather than merely incomplete is another way to limit the possibilities. What strikes me is that Doug, Michael, Yoshie and Mark offered no response to my _programmatic_ reply to Doug. I could be utterly wrong, in which case I would welcome the criticism. But I don't think I'm vague or obtuse. Doug wrote (in a subsequent message) that the left has no analytical vocabulary for talking about 'good' times. My position is that the left has the vocabulary but doesn't use it -- stubbornly refuses to use it, refuses to even see that it is refusing to use it. I talked about how one might talk about good times and Doug, Michael, Yoshie and Mark didn't respond. I talked about the capitalism fun stuff -- leftism hair shirt dialectic and why that is so. No reply. I hinted that maybe secretly leftists prefer the drama of struggling against insurmountable odds, which basically is where I share Doug's view. No answer. Mark Jones wrote, Good stuff, however I fear a return right back to the womb may be necessary in the case of some lapsed and possibly born-again Republicans. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Speaking of volatility
Doug Henwood wrote, Once again, I have to remark on how weird it is that a bunch of friends of the working class are getting all excited about the prospects for recession, which means the disemployment of millions and lower wages for everyone else. Does the ghost of Andrew Mellon lurk over PEN-L? What is weird is your construal of the so-called excitement. Anti-socialist propaganda stands on two legs -- there is no alternative and the best of all possible worlds. The best time to advance the economic interests of workers is during an economic expansion. It so happens that during the good times such gains are likely to be attributed to the expansion itself, rather than to class struggle. On the other hand, the struggle to defend previous gains during a recession is more clearly recognized by everyone as a struggle. This creates the illusion that struggle is always a negative, defensive activity. Thus all the fun stuff comes from capitalism and the hair shirts are worn by the left. The catch is that the form in which gains have been secured during an upswing will have an important bearing on how defensible they will be during a downtown. Capital would prefer to give something to workers during the good times that it can readily take back during the bad times. That is, to provide the gains as much as possible in the form of purely economic individualistic 'utilities' -- stock options, say, rather than collective agreements. It is incumbant on friends of the working class to point out repeatedly during the good times that they won't last forever (and why) and to remind workers that the forms in which gains are taken now -- and the political and economic content of those forms -- will largely determine whether those gains will be transitory or enduring. Of course, when we do so we will be mocked incessently because there is no pressing, overt need for, say, protection against unemployment when the unemployment rate is at a 20 year low. Why would anyone want to build their foundations out of anything but sand when there is so damn much sand around and at such reasonable prices, eh? There happens to be a reason why I write and study so much about working time. The reason is not that I am a one-trick pony. The reason is that historically, reductions in working time -- which, by the way, almost invariably include wage gains as a component -- have proven to be more defensible than strictly monetary wage gains. Karl Marx noticed this. The founders of the American Federation of Labor noticed it. The 1902 report of the Industrial Commission appointed by the U.S. Congress noticed it. The early 20th century National Association of Manufacturers USA noticed and abhorred it. Organized labour in the U.S. seems to have forgotten it and has been in decline for several decades. Employers' organizations, right-wing think tanks, the financial press and mainstream economists seem to have remembered it all too well and are quick to respond with ridicule and hostility to comprehensive proposals to restrict and/or redistribute working time. Coincidentally (or not), neo-liberalism has been in ascendency for several decades. Leftists seem to take the issue for granted, as if it is all too obvious a good thing to be worth investing much effort in. Maybe leftists secretly prefer the drama of struggling against insurmountable odds to defend indefensible gains. Allow me the indulgence of quoting from the 1902 Industrial Commission report (perhaps this passage was authored by John R. Commons?). In my opinion it is the most succinct summary ever of the dialectic of hours, wages and business cycles: A reduction of hours is the most substantial and permanent gain which labor can secure. In times of depression employers are often forced to reduce wages, but very seldom do they, under such circumstances, increase the hours of labor. The temptation to increase the hours of labor comes in times of prosperity and business activity, when the employer sees opportunity for increasing his output and profits by means of overtime. This distribution is of great importance. The demand for increased hours comes at a time when labor is strongest to resist, and the demand for lower wages comes at a time when labor is weakest. Once again, I have to remark on how weird it is that a cosmopolitan left observer of business gets alternatively blasé about the irrelevance of raising the issue of unemployment during the upswing when unemployment is low and indignant about the supposed glee of friends of the working class at the prospects for recession, which means the disemployment of millions and lower wages for everyone else. There is hope, Doug. There IS a cure for blasé indignation. It is called beginner's mind. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Speaking of volatility
Ken Hanly wrote: In the US and Canada it would seem that temporary workers are used to keep full time workers from working overtime at a higher wage. Au contraire. Temp workers and part-timers are part of the mix with overtime. More temp and part-time = more overtime. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Rats abandon ship... pundits spin like mad
The following briefing.com piece is hilarious for the way that it tries to find an 'optimistic' rationale for a market play whose most likely explanation can be found at the end of the third paragraph: 12:00PM: Up until last night, the market was reeling from the thought that the much-anticipated economic rebound in the U.S. was not going to occur until next year... A slew of earnings warnings at home, a restrictive European Central Bank, and a brewing debt and currency crisis in Latin America were among the factors contributing to that belief... While the timing of an economic rebound is still very arguable, a number of positive developments after yesterday's close have raised hopes again that an economic, and earnings, rebound is on the horizon... The biggest influence in changing the prevailing mindset has been Microsoft (MSFT +4.13), which raised its sales estimates for the June quarter and, in the process, ignited hope that end demand is improving... In addition to MSFT's news, market participants have also been enthused by the better than expected earnings announcements, and guidance, from the likes of Yahoo! (YHOO +0.78), Motorola (MOT +1.98) and Sonus Networks (SONS +4.09)... Other notable companies to share good earnings news were General Electric (GE +1.70), Tyco (TYC +0.99), Enron (ENE +0.21) and First Union (FTU +0.70)... Suffice it to say, this slate of good news has been a welcome change of pace from the disappointing earnings news that has been heard the past few weeks... Accordingly, investors have been willing to overlook negative developments today like a number of warnings from the retail sector, a sharp spike in initial claims for the week of July 7, and continued investor fallout in Argentina stemming from debt default concerns... Presently, Argentina's Merval Index is down 11.8%... The U.S. indices, meanwhile, are posting healthy gains, which has been the case since the start of trading... The buying interest has been widespread with technology, financial and retail stocks leading the way... Interestingly, volume continues to be on the moderate side at the Nasdaq, which could perhaps suggest that there is some underlying caution about the sustainability of today's rally... That point notwithstanding, there is no mistaking the aggressive posture of today's markets as most of the notable laggards are found in defensive-oriented industry groups like tobacco, health care, drugs and gold... Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: BLS Daily Report
If I didn't know you better, Doug, I'd have guessed the So let me see if I've got this right gambit is a holdover from your adolescent right-wing Yale period. You can take the boy out of the Buckley, but you can't take the Buckley out of the boy. Jez kiddin'. No, of course you don't have it right. The BLS can produce stats based on whatever technique it thinks is appropriate to whatever purpose. Smart folks should understand that whatever stats comes out of the BLS will be used for some purposes it's not suited for, often by people who should know better. The briefness of turning points is not the issue. Someone could have a perfect driving record for 35 years, take his eyes off the road for 5 seconds and plow through a crowd of school children in an intersection. The casualties will be just as dead or maimed as if the guy was chronic violater. Trust me on this, Doug. I'm not a reader/consumer/recycler of ready-made statistics. It's my job to mold fully formed stats out of raw data. I'm good at it, too (references on request). There's more than one way to skin a stat. But -- so let me see if I've got this right -- plenty of other numbers? an accurate and almost real-time picture of what's going on? There's a saying, do you want it now, or do you want it done right? To glibly claim that numbers can be simultaneously accurate and almost real-time is to disparage the hard work that statisticians do and the complexity and ambiguity of the materials they work with. How many great meals have you had that were prepared in a microwave? Numbers that are BOTH accurate and instantaneous (stock indexes, for example) are fundamentally trivial, which is evidenced by their volatility. Doug Henwood wrote, So let me see if I've got this right - the BLS shouldn't use a more accurate technique because there's a one in ten chance it will be briefly inaccurate? Turning points, after all, are even briefer than recessions themselves - we're talking about a few months out of many years. And they produce plenty of other numbers - e.g. the household survey and the unemployment claims figures - which do give an accurate and almost-real time picture of what's going on. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Speaking of volatility . . .
Paging Dr. Schaap, paging Dr. Schaap . . . What's your take on the MerValous paroxysm at NASDAQ? The scent of death sure gets the vultures aflutter, eh? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Crap alert!
It's deja vu all over again (only this time it's going to be different): Even bad news couldn't shake the market. Investors looked past a U.S. government report that the number of Americans lining up to receive first-time unemployment benefits last week reached its highest level since 1992. Worries that a three-year economic slump would leave Argentina unable to pay its debt also rolled off Wall Street. Motorola, Si! Savonarola, No! Reality checks, folks. My reading is that the bad news shook the market UP. It's like they say in the Beatles song, You say you want an intervention Well you know We all want to change the rate You tell me it's a big recession Well you know We all want to change the rate But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Greenspan . . . [Pen-l contest: complete the last line here, what rhymes with Greenspan, anyway?] Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Crap alert!
Doyle Saylor wrote, Everyone will laugh at you on C-Span Nice try, but its a stretch. Doug Henwood wrote, Well at least it'll reduce the workweek. That doesn't even rhyme. Think, Doug: beancan? meanman? steamfan? cleanscan? And here I thought you were an English major. On second thought maybe that explains it. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Crap alert!
Doyle Saylor asked: ? I win if I am the only entry! Too late, Doyle. Rob put in a contender. And we still haven't heard from Jim three bears Devine and Max the tax Sawicky. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Speaking of volatility
Rob Schaap wrote, It'll wear off by lunchtime, and it'll hurt all the more then. Was that lunch Tokyo time? Tokyo stocks open mixed after Nasdaq surge Tokyo stocks falter by midday, buck U.S. surge Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Lord Layard of Highgate
See page 198, Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives, edited by Lonnie Golden and Deborah M. Figart, Routledge, 2000. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Lord Layard of Highgate
Michael Keaney wrote: Aw, come on. Please just give us the killer quote. Don't tease. (Oh, alright. BTW, the Lord of Layard relies frequently and centrally on the supposed lump of labour [or output] fallacy to disparage any alternatives to his vicious and untenable welfare-to-work panaceas. Most recent -- that I know of -- is Welfare-to-Work and the Fight Against Long-term Unemployment, a report to Prime Ministers Blair and D'Alema and the Council of Europe, March 2000 http://cep.lse.ac.uk/ welfare.pdf See also http://www.ft.com/fteuro/qbac6.htm) In their explanation of the fallacy, Layard, et al. adhered to the convention that work-sharing advocates assume a fixed amount of work, but in other respects they presented quite a different argument from Hunt as to why work-sharing cannot alleviate unemployment (1991: 502-505). In the Layard version, the cut in hours initially might lower unemployment but only at the cost of increased inflation. If this were the case, they argued, there could be one of two sets of consequences. One possibility is that inflation would be tolerated -- in which case it would have been better to cut unemployment by expanding output through fiscal stimulation. Another is that government will act to curb inflation by allowing unemployment to rise back up to its prior level -- in which case everyone will end up worse off because output will have been lowered with no gain in employment. In contrast to Hunt, who had explained the fallacy in terms of the microeconomic behavior of the firm, Layard et al. explained it as a failure to anticipate an eventual macroeconomic policy response from the government. In restating Layard's argument, Katz left it unclear whether the eventual spoiler of the expected employment gains was the firm or the state, A reduction in the unemployment rate is likely to increase the bargaining power of incumbent workers and lead to wage increases that reduce the employment gains (1998: 374). Although the Hunt and Layard versions each offer partial explanations of why a work-sharing strategy may not be effective under different specified circumstances, they both digress from the conspicuous charge of fallacy. The differences between the two versions highlight their improvised and incomplete status. Neither version establishes why advocacy of work-sharing must, necessarily, rest on a belief in a fixed amount of work. Because that claim is unsubstantiated -- indeed, cannot be substantiated because it is incorrect -- the subsequent explanations of why such a belief is fallacious are gratuitous. Surveying the various instances where the lump-of-labor fallacy is invoked, it becomes clear that the ad-hoc quality of explanation is yet another characteristic feature. Those who use the phrase and allege that work-sharing advocates assume a fixed amount of work seem to sense that there is something missing in the argument, so they tack on an explanation borrowed from somewhere else in the economists' bag of tricks. What is really missing, though, is evidence for the charge, a logic for the implied assumption and an authoritative source for the legendary fallacy. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Lord Layard of Highgate [URL correction]
There was a typo in the URL for the Layard paper. Here is the corrected URL: Welfare-to-Work and the Fight Against Long-term Unemployment, a report to Prime Ministers Blair and D'Alema and the Council of Europe, March 2000 http://cep.lse.ac.uk/welfare.pdf See also http://www.ft.com/fteuro/qbac6.htm) Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: BLS Daily Report
Doug Henwood wrote, remember, the U.S. economy has expanded for about 75% of the time since the end of WW II That sounds like an underestimate to me. All I've got handy is annual GDP figures for Canada, 1962-99. They show 3 years out of 38 contracting. Assuming those 3 minus years contracted for 4 consecutive quarters and throwing in another 12 quarters of contraction for good measure, leaves about 85% expansion. This crude reckoning corroborates the guess I made before cranking up my spreadsheet. I wouldn't expect the U.S. record for the entire post wwII period to be worse. But I should point out that if you walk out in the rain, you are probably not getting hit by raindrops on more than 15% of your body surface at any one time. That 15% can get you awful wet. Numbers that are least accurate at turning points are like brakes that work most of the time except for sudden stops or on steep hills. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Swoon gets interesting
Have a peek (but you might have to do some delving): http://www.uniondues.com/ Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: K-waves
Jim Devine wrote: Jerry Lembke had an article SCIENCE SOCIETY a few years ago which emphasized the role of generational effects in the organization of the working class as part of a long wave theory. Yeah, I saw that one and liked it. It independently developed a hypothesis very similar to one I developed in 1979. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: shit hits fan
So far only Max and Rob have answered and the thread under the subject heading has digressed into Vatican sports reports. There is little hope left for an economic recovery in the second half of the year, the president and chief executive officer told employees recently in a recorded telephone message. -- Globe and Mail, July 4, 2001 In 25 words or less, what are Pen-l subscribers doing to respond politically to the recession and its eventual effects on employment, wages and working conditions? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Slowdown? What slowdown?
G7 Ministers Blame Each Other for World Slowdown Finance ministers of the Group of Seven nations gathered for a one-day meeting in Rome on Saturday amid divisions between the United States and Europe over who is most to blame for the ailing global economy. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Yes, Virginia, there is a locomotive. . .
G7 Ministers Blame Each Other for World Slowdown By Mike Dolan ROME (Reuters) - Finance ministers of the Group of Seven nations gathered for a one-day meeting in Rome on Saturday amid divisions between the United States and Europe over who is most to blame for the ailing global economy. Ministers, convening in the 16th-century Villa Madama overlooking Rome, will map out the economic and financial agenda for the July 20-22 summit of G7 leaders in Genoa. But disagreement has broken out over which country or region needs to do most to help the world recovery, amid anxiety in world financial markets about the chances of a rebound in business activity and confidence this year. Europeans are determined not to be singled out for criticism while the United States insists it has done nearly all it can to revive global activity. Germany and France reacted sharply to U.S. suggestions they were not taking on what Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described as a ``locomotive role'' in the world economy. German Finance Minister Hans Eichel, speaking to the press before the G7 meeting later on Saturday, said it was ``nonsense'' to suggest Germany was at risk of entering a recession and that there were a number of positive signs for Europe's largest economy. ``In the triad,'' Eichel said, referring to the United States, Japan and the euro zone, ``the euro zone is still the strongest part although it is now showing a clear slowdown.'' He said the United States was experiencing a far stronger slowdown and that Europe had already done its part with major tax cuts that came into force on January 1 -- well before the United States implemented its own tax cuts. FINGER POINTING Eichel's comments echoed those of French Finance Minister Laurent Fabius, who issued an unusually blunt pre-meeting statement on Friday saying the United States was the main cause of global economic slowdown. ``We have to look at the essentials, and there are two,'' he said. ``The main origin of the current slowdown is the American slowdown, and the rise in oil prices.'' The spat comes amid renewed volatility on global financial markets and concerns about how slow the U.S. economy has been to react to the Federal Reserve's six interest rate cuts this year and the Bush administration's $1.35 trillion tax-cut program. The European Central Bank's reluctance to cut interest rates because of above-target inflation was also a growing concern outside Europe. Japan's plan to stimulate its moribund economy with banking and fiscal reforms still needs to be tested. O'Neill came to the meeting convinced U.S. tax and interest rate cuts, aimed at averting a full-blown recession in the world's largest economy, have not been matched by aggressive growth-boosting policies from all his G7 partners. ``We are...doing our part to contribute to strong and stable growth worldwide,'' O'Neill said on Thursday before departing for Rome. ``Europe and Japan...can play a locomotive role and they need to play a locomotive role as well.'' Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
shit hits fan
There is little hope left for an economic recovery in the second half of the year, the president and chief executive officer told employees recently in a recorded telephone message. -- Globe and Mail, July 4, 2001 In 25 words or less, what are Pen-l subscribers doing to respond politically to the recession and its eventual effects on employment, wages and working conditions? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
and now the old news. . .
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. jobless rate edged up in June and job losses mounted as weakness spread to the service sector of the economy, the government said on Friday in a report that cast a shadow on other recent upbeat data. Perhaps the most worrisome aspect of the report was the fact that weakness seen for months in the manufacturing sector seemed to have spread to the service segment of the economy, which has countered softness elsewhere in recent months. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: K-waves
Easy. Generational cohort replacement cycle. You know the old saying rags to riches to rags in three generations? I figure that as one and a half K-waves. Come in on the downswing. Go out on the upswing. Or vice versa. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Marx's method
Like wow, Max, I can almost hear the beat of the bongos in the background as you intone your cool poem, man. Truly digmatic. The truly digmatic would discern the macro foundations of micro. mbs Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Dirty job
as a secretary, was on welfare, and living in a two bedroom government subsidized apartment. She had a stove, a frost free refrigerator, and cable TV. Her children never went to bed without a meal. I call that living within your means. If I am to go on to get a master's degree and become the CTO of a large company should I have my pay taxed significantly higher so that that woman can get a bigger television, or maybe a satellite dish, or name brand clothes for her and her children. I don't think so. In this country each of us is responsible for our current situations and we each have the ability to improve or worsen those situations. That is what makes capitalism and the U.S. great. Reference: Bluestone, Barry. The Inequality Express. (Cited in Annual Editions Sociology 98/99. Dushkin/Mcgraw-Hill 1998) . Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Lying About Vietnam (and lying about economics)
Daniel Ellsberg is also author of the 1961 article, Risk, ambiguity and the Savage axioms published in the _Quarterly Journal of Economics_. That article makes it quite clear why and when it doesn't make sense to treat *uncertainty* as if it was probabilistic risk, something that economic modelers persist on doing anyway. June 29, 2001 Lying About Vietnam By DANIEL ELLSBERG The Pentagon Papers, published 30 years ago this month, proved that the government had long lied to the country. Indeed, the papers revealed a policy of concealment and quite deliberate deception from the Truman administration onward. A generation of presidents, believing that the course they were following was in the best interests of the country, nevertheless chose to conceal from Congress and the public what the real policy was, what alternatives were being pressed on them from within the government, and the pessimistic predictions they were receiving about the prospects of their chosen course. Why the lies and concealment? And why, starting in 1969, did I risk prison to reveal the documentary record? I can give a definite answer to the second question: I believed that the pattern of secret threats and escalation needed to be exposed because it was being repeated under a new president. . . http://partners.nytimes.com/2001/06/29/opinion/29ELLS.html?todaysheadlines Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Lying About Vietnam (and lying about economics)
Harry Kreisler: Let's go back a minute, because we should say that your training was in economics at Harvard. And as you mentioned, you were working on decision making. But I'm hearing you say in all of this that you were a real empiricist, that is, sort of gathering the facts about what we were doing and what was working. Daniel Ellsberg: I don't know if I'd describe myself that way. Yes and no. I was a real researcher, a real analyst, as well as having been involved in the policy process directly. My work in economics was in economic theory, and my interest was in what's called decision theory. Decision making under uncertainty. I wrote my honor's thesis on that, and later my Ph.D. thesis. So I was interested both in the theory of how people do or should make decisions faced with uncertainty, and empirical data on how that worked. And then, when I came to the Rand Corporation, I was interested in applying that body of concepts and that kind of interest to actual political decision making. And I wanted to use the political decision making to inform the theory as well. But I got increasingly involved in the policy. So, aspects of bargaining theory, so-called game theory, adversarial relationships in conflict under uncertainty, was my particular interest. And of course, the question of how the president, say, would make a decision as to whether or not to launch nuclear missiles, faced with ambiguous data from radar early warning systems. Very much the same kind of problem as the president faced when we had ambiguous radar and sonar data about an attack on our warships, and he wanted to react very quickly. In form, the problem was very similar and it was the kind of thing that I was particularly interested in. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Urban Genetic Engineering, with Jesse Lemisch
Louis Proyect wrote, but once you have your catch, you can eat, drink, fuck and tell stories around the campfire. Shucks, and all we ever did was roast marshmallows. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
The 'R' word
``Either we are in a recession or this is the worst non-recession ever,'' said Anirvan Banerji, director of research at the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI). ``It's not different this time. It is following the classic pattern with minor variations.'' http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/010626/business_economy_recession_dc.html? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: 35 hour work week
Thanks to Ian Murray for forwarding the John Lichfield story to pen-l. It never ceases to amuse me that the theme of shorter working hours consistently sparks little or no response from progressive economists. For the record, anyway, here is a note I sent to Charlotte Thorne of the Industrial Society who was quoted in the John Lichfield story as saying, The French seem to be throwing away the textbook of labour market policies. Dear Charlotte Thorne, I saw mention of your name in a report by John Lichfield on the French miracle of the 35-hour work week and was interested in your quoted view that The French seem to be throwing away the textbook of labour market policies. I subsequently found the website of the Industrial Society and had a look at your report, Another Country: France versus the Anglo-Saxon Economists. That report includes a section titled Can you create jobs by recycling hours?, which on page 4 discusses the lump of labour fallacy. Having recently completed a historical study of the origins of the so-called lump of labour fallacy, I would say there is a strong case for throwing away the textbook of labour market policies. Essentially, the textbook with its pet lump of labour fallacy claim has eschewed genuine orthodox (Anglo-Saxon) economic theory and substituted for it a reactionary polemic publicized by early 20th century employer groups such as the U.S. National Association of Manufacturers. Genuine orthodox economic theory (as opposed to the mainstream but ersatz Anglo-American textbook creed) corroborates the counter-analysis that you present on page 5 of your report. That theory was articulated in 1909 by Sir Sidney Chapman in his presidential address to the Section on Economic Science and Statistics of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. My findings have been published as a chapter, The 'lump of labor' case against work sharing: populist fallacy or marginalist throwback in _Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives_, edited by Lonnie Golden and Deborah M. Figart (Routledge, London and New York, 2000). I would urge you to have a look at a brief summary of the chapter that I have posted on the web. French Miracle: http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=78940 Another Country: http://www.indsoc.co.uk/futures/FastFutures.htm Lump-of-labor summary http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/execsum.htm Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Query on Passage from Ch. 6, Results...
The version in the appendix to capital [p. 983] translates it differently and as two sentences: This is why we find in the capitalist process of production this *indissoluble fusion* of use-values in which capital subsists in the form of the *means of production* and *objects* defined as capital, when what we are really faced with is a definite social relationship of production. In consequence the *product* embedded in this mode of production is equated with the commodity by those who have to deal with it. I trust this is clearer than the sentence you reported, which doesn't appear to be grammatical. Carrol Cox wrote, The sentence that throws me immediately precedes: Hence where the capitalist production process is the basis the _use values_ in which capital exists in the form of _means of production, the character of these _things_ as _capital_, which is a particular social relation of production; just as to those caught up in this mode of production the _product_ counts as in and for itself a _commodity_. This is the basis . . .fetishism (CW 34, pg.392) Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Query on Passage from Ch. 6, Results...
Jim Devine wrote, Tom translates Marx: I merely transcribed that which Ben Fowkes translated. I interpret this as saying that capitalist power -- capitalist domination in social relations -- requires the ownership of actual physical means of production, so that capitalism really takes hold -- involving the real subjection of labor -- with the rise of machinofacture (modern industry). I would interpret it somewhat differently. What Marx is talking about in the context of the passage is the tendency of political economy to demonstrate 'identity' by abstracting from distinctions, i.e. because wage-labour is labour, all labour is necessarily wage-labour or potentially wage-labour; because capital consists of means of production, all means of production are, or potentially are, capital. Such abstract identities obscure the reality that means of production are only capital and labour is only wage-labour *given historically specific social relations*. Thus to political economy the historically specific is naturalized as something universal and then when that supposedly universal principle is re-discovered in the current mode of production that mode is held up as exemplary in its fidelity to economic fundamentals. Marx is thus not simply talking about an illusion but about an *appearance* that is based on a [historically specific] reality but that conceals precisely its own contingency. What capitalist domination in social relations requires is that people come to regard ownership as a relationship between a person and a thing. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Query on Passage from Ch. 6, Results...
I agree entirely. That's what makes the fetishism so enduring. I suspect that part of the fetishism is also its uncanny ability, when cornered, to disguise itself as a *mere phantasm*. Jim Devine wrote, While capitalist domination in social relations requires the fetishism of commodities that obscures class relations -- so that, among other things, ownership is seen as a mere relationship between a person and a thing (a machine or whatever) -- part of Marx's analysis is that there is an objective basis for this fetishism. The objective domination of life by commodity production encourages fetishized conceptions to be embraced by the participants in the system and orthodox economists. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
RE: A Clinton encounter
I would tend to believe the opposite of anything Claire Sterling wrote. Max Sawicky wrote, In general, convincing, but is Claire Sterling a reliable source? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Childress Metric (riding the INFO-PLACEBO time machine)
Flaw in the argument is that productivity here is irrespective of the integrity of the information being processed. One uses the same formula to measure noise productivity as signal productivity. IT generates a lot of noise. It is labour intensive to eliminate this noise so IT generates countervailing noise to mask the noise. People use spreadsheets in their everyday work. People work on different platforms. People exchange files to do collaborative work. People cut and paste from one file to another. People don't know that x-file is 1904 date system and y-file is 1900 date sytem (did you know?). June 8, 2001 becomes June 7, 1997. Data is corrupt. Nobody realizes. That is noise. Sometime in the past month you may have read a number based at least in part on a date that was off by precisely four years and a day. You may have cited that number in an analysis you did. You will never know which one it was. It may have affected your conclusions. Imagine all these little cut and past four year and a day errors migrating into actuarial tables, pharmaceutical drug trials data, equipment maintenance logs, etc., etc., etc. What a difference [four years and] a day makes [1462 times] twenty-four little hours . . . Now stop imagining. Childress forwarded by Saylor: By including the time needed to complete a workflow process in the formula, it then becomes possible to arrive at a number that measures relative productivity of the workflow process itself using the formula: Productivity = (nTask_KU /nWorker_KU) + Hours Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Why is everyone afraid of the eonic effect?
As a congenital incomprehensible myself, I have an instinctive sympathy and patience for struggling incomprehensibles. I'm afraid to say, though, I couldn't grok the eonic effect and I'm afraid it may be eons before I do. Perhaps if you could just repeat yourself LOUDER, John, we'll all get it. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Great New Labour victory
Uh-oh, now look for New Labour to repeal the 10 Hours Act because of its wanton interference with the blind rule of supply and demand. Chris Burford wrote New Labour has made many unpalatable compromises to achieve this, but within the terrain of bourgeois democracy, I suggest the result should be judged against Marx's yardstick in his address to the First International 1864. In the context of the great victory of the 10 Hours Bill, Marx spoke of the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class [bourgeoisie] and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Fwd: BBC interview with Tony Blair
No you didn't. Jim Devine wrote, I paid for an argument. All I'm getting is a contradiction! -- Monty Python. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Leviticus
This also happens to be the nuance that utilitarianism systematically neglects. The wisdom in this passage reflects a universal traditional wisdom about the folly of pursuing self-interest too avidly. Tim Bousquet wrote: Despite the above-cited absurdities, Leviticus does have some laws that make a lot of sense. My favorite is 19:9: Suppose you are harvesting your crops. Then do not harvest all the way to the edges of your field. And do not pick up the grain you missed. Do not go over your vineyard a second time. Do not pick up the grapes that have fallen to the ground. Leave them for poor people and outsiders. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
