Test (please disregard)
test
Re: Unemployment Crisis
Dunno, Hugo. Perhaps you should toss a question about this conference into Pen and see what comes back? Sid Shniad > > Ulf wanted to know about this Copenhagen meeting in April 1995. I've > come across mention of a 'World Social Summit' being organised by the > UN in 1995. Is this the same thing? > > Hugo Radice > [EMAIL PROTECTED] >
Re: Unemployment Crisis
I don't have any info on the Copenhagen conference. Sorry. Sid Shniad > > > JOBS CRISIS GROWING, ILO REPORT SAYS > > > > WASHINGTON -- Thirty per cent of the world's labour force is > > either out of work or underemployed -- a global jobs crisis > > gripping both rich and poor nations, a United Nations agency > > say. > (...) > > World leaders are to gather in Copenhagen in April, 1995 > > to try to tackle the crisis and the world poverty that goes > > with it. > (...) > > -- Globe and Mail, February 3, 1994 > > > > > > Sid Shniad > > I would like to know more about this gathering of world leaders in > Copenhagen on unemployment and poverty (April 1995). Please send me > informations. > > Thank you in advance, Ulf > > -- > Arbeitslosenselbsthilfe Oldenburg (ALSO) > Kaiserstr. 19, D-26122 Oldenburg (Oldenburg), FRG > Tel: 0441-16313 (+49-441-16313), Fax: 0441-16394 (+49-441-16394) > E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Internet), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (/CL) > >
Graduate Programs
Dear colleagues: I am a graduate student in economics at the University of Texas-Austin where our program has undergone drastic and profound changes under the chairmanship of Dr. Richard Dusansky. A department known for its institutionalist stance in the past has been raided by neoclassical hordes and any alternative paradigm shoved aside. Graduate students, and some faculty, have resisted this shift with little success. We have been putting out (on and off) a newsletter and I was wondering if people in the list would be interested in receiving some of the articles and the editorials of such newsletter. Some of the discussion is around the issue how useful a purely neoclassical education is in terms of benefits for society (how applicable to social problems), other themes are oriented towards the role of graduate students in shaping the curriculum or participating in departmental decision making. Regarless of whether anyone would like to read the pieces I want to hear from people in other departments (faculty and graduate students) who can tell me what is going on in their schools. Are all Marxist, Structuralist and Institutionalist economists around the country being pushed aside through changes in the curriculum, pressures to graduate quickly, etc? I hope we can get some debate started on this issue on the list, and I hope there will be some interest on The Machete articles so we have a starting point from which to discuss graduate education in economics. Let me know and I will send 3 or 4 articles. Thanks, Leopoldo Rodriguez
Re: San Francisco Fed
On Thu, 21 Apr 1994 11:11:28 -0700 Doug Henwood said: >Can a change in Fed policy really do much about structural unemployment >in Bed-Stuy or rural Mississippi? I don't think so. Of course, we'd be >marginally better off if Parryites weren't running the Fed, but I think >it's easy to overestimate the curative powers of easy money. Low interest >rates are no substitute for steeply progressive taxes, vigorous public >investment, and generous minimum income and other social benefits. > If we actually were serious about attacking structural unemployment (with training and jobs programs, etc.) it would be important to have support from the Fed. Training programs are useless in the face of high unemployment. As long as we live under capitalism, jobs programs and income supports will be very expensive if the Fed isn't encouraging corporations to employ more people. So expansionary monetary policy should be seen as complementary to serious efforts to cure structural unemployment. (It goes both ways: expansionary monetary policy, if pursued in a sustained way, can lower the amount of structural unemployment through the "hysteresis effect." This is made more effective by serious efforts to fix jobs markets.) On the other hand, to what extent does the Fed have much to say about interest rates and the supply of credit in the long run? The banks' financial innovation and the globalization of money make monetary policy weak in the long run, even though the Fed can trigger recessions and (to a lesser extent) booms in the short term. Just a thought. Is this plausible to pen-l? in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine BITNET: jndf@lmuacadINTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., Los Angeles, CA 90045-2699 USA 310/338-2948 (off); 310/202-6546 (hm); FAX: 310/338-1950 if bitnet address fails, try [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: San Francisco Fed
Can a change in Fed policy really do much about structural unemployment in Bed-Stuy or rural Mississippi? I don't think so. Of course, we'd be marginally better off if Parryites weren't running the Fed, but I think it's easy to overestimate the curative powers of easy money. Low interest rates are no substitute for steeply progressive taxes, vigorous public investment, and generous minimum income and other social benefits. Doug Doug Henwood [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Left Business Observer 212-874-4020 (voice) 212-874-3137 (fax) On Wed, 20 Apr 1994, Eugene Coyle wrote: > Today's Wall Street Journal quoted Robert Parry, the long- > term President of the SF Federal Reserve Bank as saying > "Slack in labor and product markets has all but > evaporated." This in a state where the unemployment rate is > substantially higher than the high national rate. > This remark is the Fed's justification for attempting to slow > down the economy. Does Doug Henwood think things would improve > if we got rid of people like Parry (a voting member of the > Open Market Committtee) and replaced him with someone who could > see the unemployed? I do. Gene Coyle >
Re: Objectivity in Textbooks
The questionnaire that Marx constructed and distributed is reprinted in Marx and Engels Collected Works, International Publishers, Vol 24, pp. 328-346. It makes for intersting reading, and may provide some insight into the relationship Marx understood to exist between subjective perception and objective conditions. Sandy Thompson Vassar College [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Objectivity in Textbooks
The following quote is from Earl Babbie (1992), _The Practice of Social Research_, 6th ed. (Wadsworth), p. 261: A little-known survey was attempted among French workers in 1880. A German political sociologist mailed some 25,000 questionnaires to workers to determine the extent of their exploitation by employers. The rather lengthy questionnaire included items such as these: Does your employer or his representative resort to trickery in order to defraud you of a part of your earnings? If you are paid piece rates, is the quality of the article made a pretext for fraudulent deductions from your wages? The survey researcher in this case was not George Gallup but Karl Marx (1880: 208). Though 25,000 questionnaires were mailed out, there is no record of any being returned. -End of Quote Does anyone have information about the survey (were any of the instruments returned?). What do people think of the gratuitous swipe at the end of Babbie's mention of the survey? It might be instructive to have students rewrite Marx's questions to be less "biased" and to discuss Babbie's presentation as a more subtle, sophisticated form of bias. Marsh Feldman Community Planning Phone: 401/792-2248 204 Rodman Hall FAX: 401/792-4395 University of Rhode Island Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Kingston, RI 02881-0815
Re: Unemployment Crisis
Ulf wanted to know about this Copenhagen meeting in April 1995. I've come across mention of a 'World Social Summit' being organised by the UN in 1995. Is this the same thing? Hugo Radice [EMAIL PROTECTED]
China & MOP etc.
1. China, State capitalism, market socialism . . .? It may be politically reassuring to find a down home label to capture the nature of China's political economy, and some argue that it is theoretically essential, but will the labels help us to grasp the nature of the contradictions in the present conjuncture, to understand why the Chinese economy has been the world's most dynamic over the last decade, or to understand where China is headed? Given our present knowledge, I'd have to answer no. Focusing on TVEs as Paul Bowles and others are, is one promising approach toward better comprehending the contemporary dynamic and its emerging features. Better at present to make sense of the mix of state, village, private capital, and foreign capital in the ownership and control of these enterprises, including a sense of the dominant forms that Tavis Barr has asked about. At present, it seems that there are no studies that would allow the regressions she inquires about. Rather, research is at the stage of looking closely at individual examples of the phenonomenon and attempting to gain perspective on the dominant forms, with little help in the way of basic statistical control over the types and forms. If such approaches leave us as blind men grasping at the elephant, the situation is not noticeably worse than it was in the late Mao years when the assumed identity of institutions and general conditions that ran through some of the literature simply masked our general ignorance of the situation on the ground. 2. Foreign trade. I'm interested in Lynn Turgeon's discussion of the Maoist legacy with its preferance for balanced trade with each partner and how this so well suits the neo-mercanitism of advanced capitalist countries. That concept of balanced trade was explicitly written into the longterm Chinese-Japanese trade agreements in the 1980s and 90s. At the same time, China has frequently had both substantial trade deficits and surpluses with particular countries at given times, and has not hesitated to use trade politically to secure specific ends. In mentioning a projected $9billion import surplus for 1994, LT seems to be suggesting something systemic or chronic, but it is not clear what is meant. CND 4.15.94 for example notes that China had the first trade deficit (US$12.8 bil) in 1993, the first deficit in four years. Nick Lardy's Customs data on China trade from 1980-91 (CQ 131, p. 694) shows substantial trade surpluses for 1989-91 following deficits in the preceding four years. How then do the non-mercantilist preferences fit into the strategies of advanced capitalist countries, or anyone else?
Re: Unemployment Crisis
> JOBS CRISIS GROWING, ILO REPORT SAYS > > WASHINGTON -- Thirty per cent of the world's labour force is > either out of work or underemployed -- a global jobs crisis > gripping both rich and poor nations, a United Nations agency > say. (...) > World leaders are to gather in Copenhagen in April, 1995 > to try to tackle the crisis and the world poverty that goes > with it. (...) > -- Globe and Mail, February 3, 1994 > > > Sid Shniad I would like to know more about this gathering of world leaders in Copenhagen on unemployment and poverty (April 1995). Please send me informations. Thank you in advance, Ulf -- Arbeitslosenselbsthilfe Oldenburg (ALSO) Kaiserstr. 19, D-26122 Oldenburg (Oldenburg), FRG Tel: 0441-16313 (+49-441-16313), Fax: 0441-16394 (+49-441-16394) E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Internet), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (/CL)
