Re: RE: open-source teaching

[Tavis Barr]

The point about plagiarism is interesting and one I hadn't thought
about.  Though I don't think there's really a way to avoid the threat
whatever we put online.  One solution is that my university subscribes
to a service that will scan papers for plagiarism (it seems a bit
cop-like but unfortunately it's probably necessary sometimes) and we
could conceivably add our online publications to their database.

The second point is also well-taken, though I think there's value in
replacing proprietary textbooks altogether.  I hope GNA&W don't take
this the wrong way; I intend to use their textbook, and I recognize that
our means of production are not set up so that people can be compensated
for work they give away.  I.e., it's hard work writing a textbook and
it's reasonable to wish for payment.  Nevertheless, over the long run,
even volunteer efforts if offered by a large enough people should be
able to replace the entire body of important work.  Just as, on my
desktop machines, I don't use any proprietary software, with the
exception of Stata (which I have too much legacy code in) and Acrobat
Reader, which is free and works better than gv or xpdf so what the
heck.  Of course, we'll go after the material provided by cheap, useful,
and progressive publications last (heck if this kind of project never
takes off we'll never go after them at all) but I do think we should
have the long term goal of bringing all educational materials into the
public domain, even if in practice we never achieve that goal.


Best,
Tavis




On Fri, 2003-02-28 at 14:14, Devine, James wrote:
> two commens. 
> 
> 1. For several years, I have put my lecture notes & hand-outs on-line,
> first on my web-site and later on Blackboard. In the first case, I got
> the feeling that students at other universities were plagiarizing my
> lectures for term papers. Those who set up an on-line open-source
> economics page have to be concerned with this issue. 
> 
> 2. If we could convince Goodwin, Nelson, Ackerman, and Weisskopf
> (GNAW) to keep their "Microeconomics in Context" in the cheap
> paperback form it's currently in, then it would help fight textbook
> inflation.

open-source teaching

[Tavis Barr]

Hi everyone.

I've decided to pop back on the list to follow up on my message that Jim
forwarded. I actually have a great deal of interest in this question and
I'm hoping some others here might find themselves in the same boat as me
and therefore also be interested.

My question was a bit open-ended because I was figuring that I'd have to
adapt my efforts to what's actually out there or what other people are
interested in rather than magically discovering that other people were
thinking precisely what I was or have identical interests.

My own interest stems from really two things:

(1) My students get ripped off for text books.  This has always been a
gripe, but it seems to me in the last ten years, with text book prices
rising faster than inflation (perhaps companies can get away with this
because tuition has risen faster than inflation) it's taken on new
dimensions.  

I teach some fairly standard courses and the ideas in those courses are
not novel to whoever  writes a textbook.  Really all the person writing
the textbook is providing is a new phrasing of existing ideas (usually
even the organization of those ideas is not new) plus the paper and
glue.  My students often have to pay $120 for a very unoriginal text.  I
suspect that like many on pen-l I largely teach not-terribly-wealthy
people though of course some of my students are terribly wealthy.

(2) I've done a lot of work writing both open-source software and
documentation for open source software.  Mostly this has been in the
form of small contributions to large projects (e.g., Samba; the Linux
Network File System) though I'm also committed to helping develop the
next version of a stats package called Gretl (I'm way behind on this
work at the moment).  I'm also a co-maintainer of the Linux NFS HOW-TO.

This experience has shown that it's quite possible for several people to
collaborate on a body of work and post it on the web for free, and that
several people making small contributions can end up producing something
quite substantial and sophisticated.  And now that the internet has
gotten rid of paper-and-glue costs, it's possible to create a drop-in
replacement for commercial products.


So, for example, I have homework assignments, practice exams, and
lecture slides posted on my web site.  I expect others do as well. 
(Mine are not exemplary; especially for my micro courses I'm somewhat
constrained to teach a fairly neoclassical course, though for stats,
which is less political, I feel a bit more ostentatious.)  These are
things that texbook publishers try to push on you to get you hooked into
using their particular book.

I expect that there could be great returns to coordination -- that is,
there is probably a lot of duplication of effort among us when we write
our homework assignments, lecture slides, etc.  Moreover, someone might
be able to do something like take some lecture slides that I've posted,
add real improvements to them, and send them back.


To address Doyle Saylor's point: Open-source publications can be
malleable.  For example, the Linux Documentation Project (LDP)
(www.linuxdoc.org) is a series of documents -- of highly variable
quality -- that help users negotiate the Linux operating system and
related software.  They are published under either the Open Publication
License or the Gnu GPL (there is a variant that applies to written text
rather than software).  What these licenses essentially say is that you
can use and modify and re-publish the document as long as you leave the
original copyrights and acknowledgements to the authors and license in
the text. 

In practice, this works in the following way: Documents are submitted to
the LDP in a format called SGML.  It's a highly abstract markup language
that allows a document to be exported into HTML, plain text, PDF, PS,
etc. according to a template.  (Different templates can be applied to
the same SGML document to give different looks.)  Later authors can then
download the SGML version of the document and update it.

For example, some guy in Norway (whom I've never met) wrote the original
version of the Linux NFS HOWTO.  It got outdated, as these things do,
and he didn't want to update it.  (No fault of his own, he was just
doing other things in life.)  So I and two other people (whom I've never
met either) did a massive re-write of the document and then re-submitted
it and it's now published online.

In practice I think there's both a case for a fairly standard set of
books (that is, something more like the Linux HOWTOs but much longer),
and for something that's more unstructured like a wiki or a big site
with lots of links.  I think that on the one hand professors will have
some use for a work that's just handed to them because it's easy to see
the overall structure and presentation and then modify it to suit your
needs.  An open publication license would allow people to modify the
text to suit their students or views, but it would create much less
confusion and more cla

[PEN-L:3040] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Ernest Mandel on long waves

[Tavis Barr]

>From what I understand from his co-thinkers, the argument is both 
political and technological.  It is that productivity has been restored 
by the implementation of "lean production" systems, i.e., increased 
taylorization and flexibilization has allowed for productivity gains 
through mechanization.  However it has made working life more tedious and 
jobs less secure.  Hence it is a defeat for labor.

Cheers,
Tavis


On Mon, 8 Feb 1999, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Shaikh told me that he thought the offensive against labor had succeeded in
> cutting wages sufficiently to restore profitability - i.e., a political,
> not a technological, argument.

[PEN-L:2666] Re: Re: Re: Re: intern needed

[Tavis Barr]

STOP!!! PLEASE!!! I referred an intern to Doug once and she had a great 
_working_ experience.  No interaction with or complaints about his libido.  

Cheers,
Tavis



On Wed, 27 Jan 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> At 12:36 PM 1/27/99 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >Tom Walker wrote:
> >
> >>Would that be LBO as in LiBidO?
> >
> >I'm too old for one of those.
> >
> >Doug
> >
>  It is not age, Doug.  It is power, the ultimate aphrodisiac as our
> fearless leader can attest.
> 
> Wojtek
> 
> 

[PEN-L:2173] Re: issues in ABC lockout?

[Tavis Barr]

I haven't been following it closely lately, but I worked for NABET a 
couple of years ago, so I'll tell you what I remember from then.  I hope 
it helps.

While there were some wage and benefits discrepancies, the main issue was 
job security and bargaining unit erosion.  The old contract with ABC 
stated that the company could hire upto 15% of the workforce on a "daily 
hire" basis.  These workers are given most of the benefits, but ABC 
wanted the flexibility to expand and contract their workforce 
seasonally.  After the expiration of the contract, though, they wanted a 
new contract that allowed for 50% daily hires.  This has some effect of 
bargaining unit erosion (though my recollection is that daily hires have 
to join the union after a couple of months), but mainly it provides 
flexibilization for ABC at the complete expense of job security for 
workers.

The contract expired a couple of years ago.  NABET didn't want a 
protracted strike, because they were afraid they might lose.  So they'd 
do stuff like embarass ABC by sneaking union signs into broadcasts, and 
they would also have quick surprise walkouts that would start, for 
example, five minutes before a football game.

It was during one such 24-hour walkout that ABC locked the workers out in 
the beginning of November.  The NLRB later ruled that the walkout was 
legal.  They're still on strike and in negotiations, but ABC also sees 
this as a chance to bust the union.  Because they're switching 
over to HDTV technology, they're going to have to retrain the workforce 
anyway, and it seems they're hoping to leave the union workers out in the 
cold and untrained.

For more information, you could try their web site at www.nabet.org.

Cheers,
Tavis




On Thu, 14 Jan 1999, DOUG ORR wrote:

> 
> Someone has recently asked me to present a talk on recent labor disputes.
> Can anyone fill me in on the contract issues that lead to the lockout of
> workers at ABC?  I have heard that since the takeover by Disney, things at
> ABC have gotten much worse.
> 
> Thanks,
> Doug Orr
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> 

[PEN-L:2007] Re: Re: Re: BLS Daily Report

[Tavis Barr]

On Thu, 7 Jan 1999, Jim Devine wrote:

> Ellen writes:
> >Over the last few days, I have been looking over data on wages, exports,
> >bankruptcies, etc. in the former so-called emerging markets.  International
> >capital, it seems, is really putting the screws to the laboring classes in
> >Asia and South America.  Asian assets are on sale at rock-bottom prices;
> >commodity prices are so low, they're practically giving them away.  Is this
> >not the triumph of capitalism? Little wonder the Dow hit 9500.  
> 
> IMHO, the strength of the US stock market first and foremost reflects the
> strength of the US profit rate, with the speculative bubble being present
> but secondary. Orthodox economists tend to conflate what's good for capital
> (the profit rate, a high stock market) with what's good for the people (the
> GDP and its distribution, with limited negative environmental impact, etc.,
> etc.) So it's natural that they would make this mistake.
> 
> The question is whether the high US profit rate will persist given the mess
> that the rest of the world is in, not to mention the dynamic problems the
> result when an economy enjoys (and suffers from) a high and rising profit
> rate. (See my 1994 RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY paper, on-line at:
> http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/subpages/depr/D0.html or /Depr.html) 
> 
> Can the "triumph of capitalism" (or more accurately of some sectors of US
> capitalism) persist? It didn't after 1929, the previous period of similar
> capitalist triumphalism. So the question is: are we currently in the
> historical analogy of 1929 or of 1927? 

It seems, though, that US capital has found ways to benefit from the mess 
in the rest of the world.  GE, for example, made huge purchases in Asia, 
which it had been eyeing and organizing for some time but had found them 
too expensive.  The capital goods are so cheap now that even if it takes 
years for Asia to recover, GE will make out like bandits.  And their 
stock will continue to soar.  It's the old maxim about a crisis causing 
consolidation of capital, but the winners and losers were already mapped 
out before the crisis started.

If we believe that profit rates equalize across sectors, then this 
banditry should create rising profitability in the US by raising the 
opportunity cost of investing.  This would not preclude shrinkage in the 
"real" sector; in fact, it might even encourage it.


Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:1154] Re: Re: Opt out at 9998 . . .

[Tavis Barr]

On Sun, 22 Nov 1998 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> If I believe that others will opt out at 9997; if others believe that I
> and some others might opt out at 9997, they might set their sights at 9996

Oh no! The Rosenthal centipede careens onto the stock market floor and 
starts eating everything in sight! Moths invade the ticker tape, worm 
holes fill the chit sheets.  Duck, here comes another year!

Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:11519] Re: Child tax credit

[Tavis Barr]

On Tue, 29 Jul 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> In the Times today, they note that part of the entire package
> just passed is payment of minimum wage for workfare recipients.  Not that
> minimum wage is any panacea, but at least it isn't LESS than minimum.  maggie
> coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]

The package can only be helpful.  But unfortuanately, in NYC, minimum wage 
for workfare workers _is_ far less than minimum.  The average 
participant receives about $137 per month in cash, $108 in food stamps, 
and $215 in rental subsidies paid directly to the landlord.  The city 
claims to create a workweek long enough so that the workers receive 
minumum wage, but they include all the benefits in calculating that 
wage.  If you include only the cash income, then the effective wage is 
actually about $1.50/hr.

In strudel,
Tavis

[PEN-L:10975] Re: K/Y ratios

[Tavis Barr]

I guess it could mean one of two things:

(1) Capital intensive firms in the US somehow are really more productive;
(2) Relative to other countries, the US has had more productivity gains 
through speed-ups than through mechanization.

Is this a trick question?

Curious,
Tavis


On Fri, 20 Jun 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Sorry if the subject heading seems racier than it turns out to be...
> 
> Anyway, what, if anything, does it mean that the U.S. has the lowest
> capital/output ratio in the OECD? Here are some numbers for 1996, from the
> OECD in Figures, 1997 edition:
> 
> CAPITAL/OUTPUT RATIO, BUSINESS SECTOR, 1996
> 
> Australia   2.87
> Austria 3.71
> Belgium 2.89
> Canada  2.46
> Denmark 3.87
> Finland 3.57
> France  2.93
> Germany 2.75
> Greece  2.48
> Ireland 2.09
> Italy   2.82
> Japan   2.55
> Netherlands 2.18
> Norway  3.43
> Spain   2.60
> Sweden  2.89
> Switzerland 3.21
> UK  2.81
> US  1.91
> 
> Doug
> 
> --
> 
> Doug Henwood
> Left Business Observer
> 250 W 85 St
> New York NY 10024-3217 USA
> +1-212-874-4020 voice  +1-212-874-3137 fax
> email: 
> web: 
> 
> 
> 

[PEN-L:10853] Re: *FALSE AND DANGEROUS REPORT OF DEATH WARRANT

[Tavis Barr]

Blair, this was Jeronimo Ji Jaga (fka, Elmer Pratt), a then-Panther who 
was framed in the early 70s for a robbery-murder along with Angela Davis.  
Davis was acquitted, but Ji Jaga was convicted on the basis of testimony 
from an FBI informant.  The informant and the prosecution did not 
disclose his status, and so, after this guy has spent half his life in 
jail, he managed to win an appeal for a new trial.  He is out on bail 
while he awaits it.

Power to the people,
Tavis


On Mon, 16 Jun 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> I was also wondering about this report. I thought (emphasize "thought") I
> had heard on KPFA just the other day a news report that Mumia has been
> released while he awaits a hearing of some sort. I didn't say anything 'til
> now because I was only half paying attention -- trying to drive in San
> Francisco has become much more difficult, not to mention harrowing, since
> legislation was passed making it illegal to stop at stop signs or for red
> lights, or to use one's turn signals (the cops always set a good example
> regarding these new laws) -- and didn't want to be passing on false rumors.
> Has anyone else got any reliable info on this matter?
> 
> Blair
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Blair Sandler
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> 
> 

[PEN-L:10708] Catalysts

[Tavis Barr]

Maggie --

I suspected we may have been talking at cross purposes, I just have these 
instincts sometimes to be knit-pickingly clear sometimes. :|  Your point 
is well taken, and my only thought in response to your comments is to 
perhaps state the obvious: People usually believe in change, they just 
tend to think of it as (1) impossible or (2) infeasible.  When they see 
a reason to believe that they can fight for and win something that will 
make a huge difference, they ignore or work to overcome all kinds of 
social barriers.  Nevertheless, even in such situations, the barriers 
are still there.

Cheers,
Tavis



On Sun, 8 Jun 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> Tavis;
> I think we're 'talking' at cross purposes.  I didn't mean that it was wrong
> to provide tokens, in fact, I meant to say much of what you've said already,
> which is that middle class, white (and generally young) organizers often
> don't recognize how much a token is worth to someone.  I also think there are
> cultural gulfs which middle class organizers refuse to address in systematic
> ways.  Whenever 'progressive' middle class people go to organize things in
> non-white or working class arenas, there is always a hint of bringing truth
> to the masses who are incapable of discerning the truth for themselves.  As
> for your dilema with the $5, you probably (I say this not knowing the entire
> situation) would have been better just admitting you didn't have the money.
>  Most working folks can understand that very well--full time job or no.
>   Finally, what I was trying to point out is that huge movements have
> been formed and succeeded in just the situations you are saying which make
> organizing difficult.  Most unions were formed when people were working six
> days a week, 10-12 hours a day.  Most civil rights organizations have their
> broad base amongst exactly those people who may not have an extra token.
>  There is an additional catalyst to the bits you describe, and I am trying to
> figure out what that is, not saying that any of the bits you mention are
> incorrect.  For another example, unions have used the excuse that women are
> 'difficult' to organize for not recruiting or responding to women members.
>  And yet, women are currently the only demographic group increasing its union
> membership, and the few surveys taken of women workers show they have a more
> favorable attitude towards being unionized than most men.  In short, under
> many circumstances, perceived difficulties dissapear like magic.

[PEN-L:10707] Re: Catalysts

[Tavis Barr]

On Sun, 8 Jun 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> In a message dated 97-06-08 16:08:52 EDT, you write:
> >Second, I think it partly has to do with various types of complacency.  
> >In the case of the reproductive rghts movement, I remember how the 
> >movement groups sort of re-oriented toward issues of access in the early 
> >90s after it became clear that the juridical right to abortion was more 
> >or less safe.  All of a sudden, all of these upper-middle-class college 
> >activists lost interest.  Not that they didn't think it was important, 
> >they just lost the personal compulsion to stay involved.  That and the 
> >fact that, through no fault of their own but simply because of who they 
> >were, they had little connection to the rural and poor urban communities 
> >most affected by dwindling access.  For better or worse, this is a group 
> >of people who can mobilize large numbers of their friends, who have the 
> >social connections to get media attention, and who have access to 
> >experienced activists.  Their social impact is therefore disproportionate.
> 
> I disagree--the women's movement was not, is not, and has never been made up
> of primarily middle class white women with nothing else to do.  The middle
> class women may be the ones getting the press, but feminism has, and has
> always had, a much broader appeal.. It's also a little insulting to have the
> hard work of thousands of women dismissed so easily.  On the other hand, you
> seem very comfortable buying the media picture of the women's movement.
> maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Maggie --

If you look carefully above, you'll see that I was not speaking broadly 
of the women's movement, but particularly of the reproductive rights 
movement (which I think was a bit different in composition from the women's 
movement, to the extent one can actually speak of the "women's movement" 
as a unitary phenomenon).  In particular, my experience is (mostly, 
except for a couple of sojourns to major actions or conferences in other 
parts of the country) limited to Massachusetts, where I logged in several 
years spending every Saturday in front of clinics, going to meetings, 
planing rallies, zaps, etc.  I have no need for a media picture of this 
movement since I'm pretty familiar with most or all of its parts.
I should also say that activist friends of mine in New York and the Bay 
Area paint a similar picture, so I have some confidence that my 
experience is not entirely a local one. 

There were certainly hundreds of working class women who would show up at 
the clinics in and around Boston, and several dozen who organized and 
voluntered at groups like R2N2, NOW, and Mass Choice.  Nevertheless, the 
composition of these groups was disproportionately, if not a majority, 
upper-middle-class, and overwhelmingly white.  In particular, college 
students were often the shock troops of the clinic defense demos.  This 
is not to curtail anyone's legitimacy based on what community they come 
from, but just to point it out because it makes a difference in how they 
organize.  The strategies of NOW and Mass Choice (though definitely not 
R2N2) were set within the realm of bourgeois politics -- lobby, get 
petitions signed, write letters -- even if the people implementing these 
strategies were often working class people.  At least partly this was 
because NOW and Mass Choice, like the Democratic Party (though not to 
the same degree) depended largely on funding form wealthy donors to 
carry out their agenda even if the people carrying them out were not 
particularly wealthy.

All the above made it especially difficult to get people who were mobilized 
around clinic defense and keeping Roe V Wade to stay involved when what 
was called for changed a bit.  NOW and NARAL kept their focus on 
legislative battles around access, e.g., parental consent laws and 
late-term abortion.  Not that those aren't pretty important (some of my 
best friends have been on the wrong side of those laws) but I think a 
better agenda would have involved getting clinics into rural and poor 
urban communities (the latter of course can involve tricky politics) 
and providing popular education around reproductive health.  Only a 
handful of activists in Massachusetts were doing this kind of work and they 
didn't have anything like the kind of money or access to the media that 
NOW or Mass Choice did.  They tended to be focused in clinics or women's 
shelters and had fairly little ability to discourse with the mainstream 
of the movement.  

I don't think these problems with the movement were necessarily the main 
reason it dispersed.  There has been very little discussion in the media
of lack of access, and so most people really believe that abortion is 
relatively safe, at least safe enough that they don't want to do anything 
about it.  That was countered for a while because a large number of 
people started listening to movement news instead of the media and telling 
their

[PEN-L:10674] Catalysts

[Tavis Barr]

Maggie --

It would be delusional of me to claim to have the answers to your 
questions below (though there may be some on this list who will offer you 
the correct line to answer everything you were wondering about).  Just a 
few thoughts since I should get back to the rest of my life and stop 
taking up bandwidth:

First, the Panthers were the easy one since their politics were changed 
at gunpoint.  :|

Second, I think it partly has to do with various types of complacency.  
In the case of the reproductive rghts movement, I remember how the 
movement groups sort of re-oriented toward issues of access in the early 
90s after it became clear that the juridical right to abortion was more 
or less safe.  All of a sudden, all of these upper-middle-class college 
activists lost interest.  Not that they didn't think it was important, 
they just lost the personal compulsion to stay involved.  That and the 
fact that, through no fault of their own but simply because of who they 
were, they had little connection to the rural and poor urban communities 
most affected by dwindling access.  For better or worse, this is a group 
of people who can mobilize large numbers of their friends, who have the 
social connections to get media attention, and who have access to 
experienced activists.  Their social impact is therefore disproportionate.

Just a thought about Viet Nam: People often cite the draft and the fact 
that all of a sudden there was a blatant social cost to US involvement in 
the war.  Maybe it takes that kind of thing in general, I don't know  
(this is not thereby an argument for bloodshed and mayhem, which may or 
may not generate a political response but definitely gets people killed).  
Another thought is that, just as in the thirties, what looked like a 
spontaneous ourburst may only have been possible becasue of people 
sitting around getting their asses kicked for twenty years.

This is sort of incoherent but I feel like I should shut up now.

Cheers,
Tavis


On Sat, 7 Jun 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> In a message dated 97-06-08 00:48:15 EDT, you write:
> >I guess I'd say the same thing I said to Doug: Neither local activism nor 
> >national activism changes people's lives without the right politics. 
> Tavis,
>   I don't disagree with you.  I certainly think that national
> organizations without effective local activism tend to spin wheels and have
> conversations within limited audiences.  For instance, CLUW since its
> inception has continued to speak to the same small in-group of union women.
>  That is not to say that CLUW wasn't a good idea--but its appeal has remained
> limited.  This leads to my next point, I think there is a catalyst not
> identified in most left debates as to what takes activism, either local or
> large, up to a level of influential importance.  So, while I think you have
> identified some of the parts ("good" politics, local as well as national
> activism, grass roots activities), I still think there is a dynamic missing
> as to what takes each of these parts and, during different historical
> periods, leads to influential actions which change governments or changes the
> actions of governments in power (ie, as Michael Perelman pointed out--during
> the Nixon era).
>   This is not to say that I have a real great read of what the
> catalyst is.  There tends to be a strong opinion that this catalyst is the
> activity of a small group of influential individuals who 'summarize' things
> and provide leadership. (This is what Doug seems to imply in his posts.)  I
> am not sure that this is true.  While clearly there is a relationship between
> leadership and the actions of large groups, historically, there are leaders
> who no one listens to for years.  For instance, there were 'leaders' in the
> anti-Vietnam War movement for years, but it did not become a mass movement
> until twenty years after some activists were protesting the war.  Was there
> suddenly an increase in collective consciousness?  Did something in the
> political/economic climate change?  Another example, the women's movement
> produced many leaders in the 60s and 70s.  Many of these leaders are still
> there but the activist nature of that movement has dwindled to occasional
> actions.  Why? Abortion is unavailable in 3/4 of the country, most women
> still work in dead end jobs, and discrimination isn't disappearing--it may
> even have increased.  Another, why did the Black Panthers lose so much of
> their activist nature?
> 
> maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 

[PEN-L:10673] Re: French elections

[Tavis Barr]

On Fri, 6 Jun 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


[TB: "> >No long ideological battles on weekdays, I'm afraid."]  

> Are long ideological battles ever necessary?  Perhaps intellectuals don't
> communicate to non-intellectuals because the 'nons' don't want to waste time
> in ideological battles--real battles are hard enough.  Also, as I pointed out
> in another message, a higher percentage of the u.s. working class were
> organized into unions at the end of the nineteenth century than at any other
> time.  The average work day was 10-11 hours a day, six days a week.  

Maybe email doesn't always show these things well but I was being a bit 
sarcastic.  I loathe having ideological battles in political 
organizations becuase they can destroy relationships over such often 
amorphous muck (I love having them on pen-l 'cause there's so little at 
stake.  :)  ).  Sometimes they're necessary though.  People come up with 
different political strategies: lobbying and insider politics; the same 
old boring demonstration; getting arrested without actually organizing 
anybody.  These all reflect ideological positions.  It's important to 
keep disagreements as practical as possible (i.e., okay we disagree on 
this stuff, how can we still work together?) but ideology is often easier 
to argue and so it often seeps out.

It's often a tension in diverse groups.  People who have more time (often 
but not always middle class people, students, or just lefties who love 
long discussions) like to debate things more, people who have less time 
need to get a meeting over in an hour.  The danger of the former, of 
course, is that people don't have political discussions and the group 
keeps to a very narrow and boring (ad often by default mainstream) 
political agenda.  I don't think there's a right or a wrong answer about 
how much discussion to have, but there are class and (in NYC at least) 
racial effects running both ways.


> >Often they don't 
> >have money for the subway and you have to provide it. For all these 
> >kinds of reasons, it's a lot easier for staff-run organizations of 
> >middle class people to crop up claiming to represent the poor.  T
> 
> It's this we/they attitude that is at least part of the reason for the lack
> of communication.

If I understand correctly what you're saying (which I may not), I think I 
disagree entirely.  Perhaps my use of the word "you" was harried and a 
bit misplaced (I should say the group has to collectively provide things 
for its members who can't afford them), but the main point is real.  When I 
and other Columbia activists go to coalition meetings in Harlem, it's 
obvious that we're from a different environment, even if many of the 
Columbia activists are people of color form the Bronx or Brooklyn.  
Mistrust is almost instinctive, and, given the history of Columbia and 
even Columbia activists, understandable.  

That's just an extreme example of the kind of social distance that needs 
to be overcome.  The same kind of discourse that people often talk about 
discouraging women from speaking can also discourage poor people and 
people of color.  It needs to be broken down, which involves a process 
of building mutual trust.  The first step in breaking it down is to 
recognize that it's there.  

Providing tokens is something we've only done in groups with people in 
extreme circumstances, e.g., people with AIDS who depend on social 
assistance.  But financial decisions can be alienating for poor people 
in a room (for example, when I was an undergrad living on spaghetti and 
sauce, I'd be in a room full of people with full-time jobs and someone 
would say, "let's collect five bucks from everyone to finance such-and-
such;" five bucks is not much for a full-time worker, it's not much for 
me now, but I'd have to quietly pass and it was always kind of 
humiliating).  I think it's incumbent on people who have resources to 
make it clear that those resources should be pooled.


Yours for the itsy-bitsy crumbs of reform,
Tavis

[PEN-L:10672] Re: French elections

[Tavis Barr]

On Sun, 8 Jun 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Bob Fitch told me that after he gave a talk on the dire economic situation
> in NYC, a staffer from one of UNITE's predecessors, ACTWU, came up to him
> and said he loved the talk except for one thing - Fitch's complaint about
> low wages (in sweatshops, lower than Hong Kong's, and in the BLS stats, a
> bit above Singapore's). The unionist was worried that raising wages would
> kill jobs.

A lot of people have this complaint about UNITE.  I have two friends who 
were former ILGWU staffers who left because the union was unwilling to 
fight for higher wages out of fear of runaway shops.  It bears mention 
that the fear is real: If there's one industry where the globalization 
story fits well, it's garments.  Of course, people pack up and move off 
to New Jersey a lot more often than they pack up and move off to 
Honduras.  So raising the local wage might not have the dire effect 
people predict (leaving aside the political point that localities need to 
draw a line in the sand against races to the bottom).  Nevertheless, on 
the shop level, there's a real fear of runaways.  I think the answer is 
generally to chase them, which UNITE doesn't seem to be doing.  But it's 
a complicated issue.


> >As a positive alternative experience I had, ACT UP has a national
> >and sometimes international network of local chapters that is vey loose
> >and disorganized but has pulled off some great national and international
> >actions (most notably at the international AIDS conerences) because of
> >the organization of the local chapters.  I think this kind of experience
> >is possible to duplicate for many other movements.
> 
> Is it really? Or was ACT-UP's success dependent on the specificity of AIDS
> and the imminence of death?

I think ACT UP's success was dependent on a lot of things.  I'm trying to 
write a pamphlet on it and it's difficult to sort out.  I won't go into 
details here.  I guess my main point re. this stuff would just be that I 
don't think ACT UP would have been better off with a national office 
than it has been with just a network (though it should bear mention that 
the New York workspace sort of served as a national office for a while).


Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:10661] Re: French elections

[Tavis Barr]

On Fri, 6 Jun 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> I think local activism is important, but it is only part of the answer.
>  People spend the bulk of their adult lives in unions, and not only do they
> not make social change, they vote conservatively.  Certainly not all, but
> being involved in a local organization does not add up to working towards
> changes in the larger community.  maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Maggie --

I guess I'd say the same thing I said to Doug: Neither local activism nor 
national activism changes people's lives without the right politics.  How 
to spread those politics differs from place to place; sometimes it's 
talking to your coworkers (a slow and thankless process); sometimes it's 
handing out flyers in the neighborhood, or, as some people I know who 
work in large factories do, at the workplace.  There are always new 
creative tactics that people are inventing.  I think in the case of union 
activism it means, among other things, working to make the union a more 
multi-issue and membership-run organization.  I know that's not possible 
(for a given activist or bunch of activists) with every union and 
sometimes we have to work in other kinds of groups.

Ultimately we do have to have national and international organization, 
but I really do believe we have to have local organization first, or at 
least before we can expect national and international organizations to be 
strong.  Think of how many national coalitions and membership groups -- 
NLGTF and HRC, the New Party and the Labor Party, countless others -- go 
around trying to out-posture each other because they have so little 
orgnanization on the local level.  Here in New York, I see UNITE 
trying to pull off all of these international solidarity campaigns for 
sweatshop workers when they barely organize sweatshop workers here in the 
City.  As a positive alternative experience I had, ACT UP has a national 
and sometimes international network of local chapters that is vey loose 
and disorganized but has pulled off some great national and international 
actions (most notably at the international AIDS conerences) because of 
the organization of the local chapters.  I think this kind of experience 
is possible to duplicate for many other movements.


Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:10609] Re: French elections

[Tavis Barr]

On Fri, 6 Jun 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

> What can I say? The activists I've talked with and reported on don't sound
> very much like the ones you describe. A recent confirmation of my analysis
> was provided in a good little report on welfare reform by Rachel Timoner
> for the Applied Research Center in Oakland. She talked with scores of
> activist groups, mainly in Calif but also around the country, and found
> them completely unprepared to deal with the end of AFDC: isolated from each
> other and the people they supposedly represent, with a palliative rather
> than transformative approach to politics. Individuals who work for these
> organizations may be seriously radical and well-informed, but the system
> they work within frustrates their best intentions.

Doug, I think we're talking about different types of organizations.  The 
disease I think you're seeing -- call it liberalism, Alinskyism, whaveter 
you like -- is more endemic to politics than the location of people's 
organizing.  Organizing the very poor, for example, is extremely 
complicated.  Poor people are highly overworked and have very little 
time.  You usually have to have all your meetings on Saturday and Sunday 
afternoons, or else right at the end of the workday and keep it short.  
No long ideological battles on weekdays, I'm afraid.  Often they don't 
have money for the subway and you have to provide it. For all these 
kinds of reasons, it's a lot easier for staff-run organizations of 
middle class people to crop up claiming to represent the poor.  That's 
the state of a lot of the welfare-rights movement in this country.  Of 
course there are exceptions (in New York, there's WEP Workers Together, 
Community Voices Heard, the Fifth Avenue Committee and lots of smaller 
organizations), but they don't have the political prominence of, say, 
the Children's Defense Fund.  That's just the way class perpetuates its 
hegemony, even within progressive movements.

> Lots of such activist groups tried to organize something called the "Same
> Boat Coalition" to fight Mayor Rudy's austerity programs, but they've
> barely been able to get out a press release. Tenant organizations are
> fighting with each other almost as much as they're fighting schemes to do
> away with NYC's rent regulations. The alternative is that these groups have
> to develop some common institutional and programmatic structures.

I worked with Same Boat at the beginning of its career.  It was 
bullshit.  It was composed of staffers from various unions and progressive 
organziations who all wanted to meet at 9am on Thursdays while they got 
paid to be there.  Needless to say, this is not a recipe for getting working 
people to your meetings.  But they didn't really care because they 
weren't out to mobilize huge numbers of working people, at least not in 
any way that might allow them to run the show.  They just wanted a group 
that handed out petitions and built small rallies.  Again, it's not 
because of Same Boat's project of building a fight-the-cuts coalition.  
It's because of their staff-based politics.

As far as the tenant stuff: The disagreements between, say, Met Council 
on Housing and Housing Solidarity network reflect genuine political 
differences.  Met Council wants to build a staff-based membership 
organization.  HSN wants to build neighborhood-based collectives of 
tenants.  HSN also has this kooky call for a citywide rent strike.  You 
can't expect people to come together if they're not going to work well 
together.


> A few years ago at a meeting sponsored by the North Star Fund, a NYC
> philanthrophy for rich radicals, a Latina reproductive rights activist told
> me she didn't want to "coalesce" with other groups because it would weaken
> her cause. I think she was simply being more honest than most in saying
> that.

I'd believe it.  I just think we're talking about different political 
circles.  You claim to have identified groups working on specific, local 
issues.  That may indeed be true, but I don't think that's what's wrong 
with the above mentioned organizations.  I think you've identified 
groups that are building through staff instead of recruiting activists.
That's what we need to fight against.

Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:10590] Re: French elections

[Tavis Barr]

On Thu, 5 Jun 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:


> A lot of this describes the state of already-existing "progressive"
> politics in the U.S. - hundreds, thousands of little local organizations
> organized around neighborhood, ethnicity, or issue, but who rarely talk
> with each other (and who are often in competition with each other for a
> small pot of foundation money). Housing groups have no analysis of the real
> estate or mortgage markets; poverty groups counsel people about to lose
> their welfare benefits, but don't really have an analysis of polarization
> and downward mobility; student groups may understand the dynamics of their
> institution, but how can schools be democratic when their social role is in
> forming good worker-subjects? Practical and theoretical action, at least in
> the U.S., has been focused on developing a micropolitics, but it seems to
> me that unless these atoms talk to each other, dispersion and defeat will
> continue.

Doug, I think you grossly underestimate the consciousness of a lot of 
activists.  Admittedly, I can only speak for New York, but for example... 
the Housing Solidarity Network activists I know have all read The 
Assassination of New York; people at the Urban Justice Center _organize_ 
people about to lose their benefits (in fact, many of them _are_ people 
about to lose their benefits), and usually talk about what WEP means for 
middle-class workers in New York as well as poor working people; the 
Liberation Classes I work with at Columbia are a group of (except for me) 
undergraduates, mostly first-years, who designed a curriculum of 
everything the school refused to teach for political reasons, while the 
Student Labor Action Coalition (which I also work with) has, as one of its 
primary goals, raising consciousness about what it means to spend the 
rest of your life working.

Does this breed a bunch of isolated groups who don't talk to each other?
Sometimes, but what's the alternative?  During the Gulf War, hundreds of 
thousands of people moblized and then disappeared as soon as the war was 
over.  During the late 80s, hundreds of thousands of people mobilized for 
abortion rights and disappeared as soon as they came once it was clear 
that a diminished Roe V Wade would stay in place.  During the 30s, when 
tens of thousands of workers were in sustained mobilization, it was 
only because of militants who spent the teens and twenties getting their 
butts kicked and learning the lessons of organizing.  

To me socialism always meant people controlling their workplaces, 
communities, and institutions that affect their lives in an equitable 
way.  If we're aiming to build that, then we have to start by working 
with people on issues of community and workplace control.  The reality 
is that people live in difference communities and work in different 
workplaces, and that's where we have to go to reach them.  That may mean 
that one person can only work in a small area, but then one person is 
not going to turn around our society.  It will take millions of people 
working together.  Self-determination is not something you can learn on 
TV or read in a book.  You can only gain it through struggle.


Peace,
Tavis

[PEN-L:10562] Re: French elections

[Tavis Barr]

On Thu, 5 Jun 1997, William S. Lear wrote:

> Anyway, we have RI -> DUI -> DA (Radical Intellectuals produce
> Democratically Useful Information, which will/can lead to Democratic
> Action).  But my little model misses something, RI -> DTM -> DUI ->
> DA, where DTM is the Democratic Transmission Mechanism.  I'm curious,
> being a not-yet-activist-intellectual, which DTMs do folks (activists
> and people) find most (cost) effective?  Radio?  Magazines?  Internet?
> Direct contact and speaking engagements?  It seems TV would be the
> best, but for obvious reasons that's pretty hard.

I think that for all kinds of reasons, we actually have to be _in_ the 
communities we're trying to change.  For some of us, this may mean 
unions, or campaings for/against various things (workfare, police 
brutality, a living wage) run by the people who are effected most by 
them.  Ultimately, socialism will be built by people responding to their 
immediate circumstances and finding that it requires a change in the 
relations of power.  For those of us at universities, that can mean 
student/faculty/worker control of the school.  It starts with demanding 
things like curriculum reform, dignity for workers, the school helping 
the surrounding community instead of colonizing it.  Ultimately people 
realize the school is not a democracy and that it could be.  Similar 
things could be said about myriad other movements and community 
organizations in different ways.  We have to struggle with people and 
learn this realization with them, because it's a different kind of 
realization for different kinds of communities.  Just braodcasting to 
"the people" over television with our idea of the correct program is, 
ultimately, just politics as usual with a left face.


Yours for the meandering road to revolution,
Tavis

[PEN-L:10549] Re: French elections

[Tavis Barr]

On Thu, 5 Jun 1997, William S. Lear wrote:

> On Wed, June 4, 1997 at 22:10:29 (-0700) Tavis Barr writes:
> >On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Michael Perelman wrote:
> >> The answer is that I would not even think of coming up with such a
> >> program.  I would devote my energies to reinvigorating the grass roots. 
> >> In the U.S., much the most progressive legislation in our history came
> >> during the Nixon years.  Did Nixon have an effective reformist program? 
> >> Of course not.  People were in the streets.
> >
> >But Michael, that's a cheap way out of the question.  I don't think any 
> >of us -- well maybe Max -- would rather be in Jospin's place than where 
> >we already are building grassroots movements.  The question was, "Well, 
> >what do you expect?"
> 
> To quote Tavis, "Wellfurchrissakes, Tavis", that *was* the question, viz:
> 
>  Okay, can I  be  corny?  If  Michael  Perelman were suddenly
>  plopped at the head of the French PS  and forced at gunpoint
>  to come up with  an effective reformist program, what  would
>  he call for? [PEN-L:10526]
> 
> So Michael answers, reasonably, that he'd reinvigorate the grass
> roots.  What more do you want?

I'm getting sick of this Michael's answer was, "I would not even 
think of coming up with such a program."  Well of course he wouldn't.  
I assume we take that for granted.  That's why I said "forced at 
gunpoint."  But if we're going to call the PS victory "depressing" 
because the "left" has no program it would be nice to know what kind of 
program would have made it less so.  I'm not thereby disagreeing about 
the PS's lack of program -- Jospin's seems like "Maastricht lite" -- but 
it seems like there may be some gains resulting from the discontent that 
the election victory represented.

A couple of questions for A.S. Fatemi, since he's the only one who's piped 
up from france: First, how realistic, and how serious, is the PC's call 
for a 35-hour workweek as part of the basis for their coalition?  Second, 
you wrote, "there is no grassroot support for the left or a clear mandate 
to carry them through."  Were you referring just to the the PS and PC 
themselves, or are there specific demands the left is making that have no 
mandate from below?

Curious,
Tavis

[PEN-L:10536] Re: French elections

[Tavis Barr]

On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Michael Perelman wrote:


> The answer is that I would not even think of coming up with such a
> program.  I would devote my energies to reinvigorating the grass roots. 
> In the U.S., much the most progressive legislation in our history came
> during the Nixon years.  Did Nixon have an effective reformist program? 
> Of course not.  People were in the streets.

But Michael, that's a cheap way out of the question.  I don't think any 
of us -- well maybe Max -- would rather be in Jospin's place than where 
we already are building grassroots movements.  The question was, "Well, 
what do you expect?"  You had bemoaned the fact that the "left" had won 
without any program and suggested that this might mean things will get 
worse.  I really don't know what kind of a program you might have hoped 
for.  If the new government passes a 35-hour workweek, fucks up the 
timetable for the Maastricht treaty, and stops privatizations, it will 
be (well I may be having a memory lapse and this is a bold thing to say 
but I'll say it) better than anything Mitterand did and he stayed in 
power for an awful long time.  Of course Mitterand discredited 
"socialism" but then most social-democratic leaders discredit social 
democracy by the time they leave power.  Saying that that makes a social- 
democratic victory depressing, as if it will make things worse, sort of has 
the ring of "first Hitler, then us"

> In some sense, we might excuse Clinton by this standard.  Lacking strong
> left pressure, he capitulates to the right.  Were we doing our jobs
> better, we might have something to be proud of coming out of the Nixon
> years.

We could excuse Clinton, or Bush, or Reagan who knows what any of 
them "really" wanted to do after they got elected?  The point is that 
Maastricht is near death because of popular discontent, and the change in 
leadership reflects that (in part because Juppe was so relentless in 
not caving in).  The bulwark of the neoliberal program is -- for now -- 
unable to survive popular discontent in France and and some major 
reforms are now on the table.   That's nothing to be depressed about.


For free baloney after the revolution,
Tavis

[PEN-L:10526] Re: French elections

[Tavis Barr]

Wellfurchrissakes, Michael, they're social democrats.  Their options are 
limited by what they can allow themselves to call for as reform.  I think 
the CP has as good a program as one could hope for from a party that's 
moved by the powers dat be, and they seem to be trying to  impose it on 
the PS as a basis for a coalition.  If raising the munimum wage and calling 
for a 35-hour workweek is adopted as a framework for combatting 
unemployment in Europe, then we're in a lot better shape than being 
resigned to listening to the International M-F types talk about the need 
to cut social programs and generate jobs through competitiveness.

Me, I'm more scared by the continuing rise of the FN.

Okay, can I be corny?  If Michael Perelman were suddenly plopped at the 
head of the French PS and forced at gunpoint to come up with an effective 
reformist program, what would he call for?

Poke, poke,
Tavis


On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Michael Perelman wrote:

> The French elections were a tragedy.  From what I understand, the left
> comes in without a program.  Please correct me if I am wrong.  They will
> offer a kindler, gentler neo-liberalism, something like Giscard.  The
> people will become disgusted, giving more credibility to the right.
> 
> It is sad that we are in such a mess as to look to a disaster in the
> making like this as a ray of hope.
> 
> --
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
> 
> Tel. 916-898-5321
> E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 

[PEN-L:10473] Junk Mail

[Tavis Barr]

Y'all --

I've noticed a dramatic increase in the amount of junk email arriving to 
my accounts, like from one a week to five a day, in the last month.  I 
don't know if it's just me or if it's happening to other people on the 
net.  I have a feeling it's the latter.  I'm writing to find out and to 
discuss taking action against it.

As we all know, there are lots of bills and lawsuits being proposed to 
deal with the problem.  Some seem good, some make me very uncomfortable.  
I'd rather talk with a bunch of other computer literate lefties about 
taking direct action.  That's why I'm writing pen-l.

One idea that comes to mind is keeping an extra core dump around on one 
of the computers I administer, with a header something like, "This is a 
BTOA-coded response to your letter," so that I can attach it as needed.  
Another is to simply flood people with fake or confusing responses.

All of this would be more effective if it were somehow organized, e.g., 
so 100 people could send some system a huge message like a core dump and 
potentially overwhelm it.  Enough reports about these things happening 
to business who do junk mail could potentially dissuade them.  I know that 
some of this is likely to be illegal, but I don't know what or how 
illegal.  If anyone knows a lawyer who knows the consequences of various 
actions and has ideas of how to avoid certain charges, that'd be great.  
Perhaps we could also take advantage of our being an international 
network.  But it would be nicer if we could do things that didn't get 
anyone in trouble.

I think the time to stop junk e-mail is now, before it gets out of hand 
and too big to deal with.

Curious for any thoughts,
Tavis



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[PEN-L:10472] Re: Labor films

[Tavis Barr]

You might also try _Out at Work_, which is a new film about lesbian and 
gay issues in the workplace.  I haven't seen it but I've heard a lot of 
good things about it.  You can order it from Frameline in San Francisco,  
415-703-8650.

Good luck,
Tavis


On Sat, 31 May 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> 
> 
> I am teaching a course this summer based on movies.  I am
> curious if anyone has any suggestions for movies with a strong
> message concerning labor issues or unions.
> 
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Loren Rice
> 

[PEN-L:10267] Inefficiencies of planning? ;)

[Tavis Barr]

-- Forwarded message --

During the heat of the space race in the 1960's, NASA
decided it needed a ball point pen to write in the zero gravity
confines of its space capsules.  After considerable research and
development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost
of $1 million U.S.  The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest
success as a novelty item back here on earth.

The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.

[PEN-L:10179] Re: Tavis, you're *still* wrong

[Tavis Barr]

I'm enjoying this thread on beer, though I'd like to request that my name 
be excised from the title because I think "Tavis=wrong" is attaining meme 
status on pen-l (and will no doubt surface up years later as an addendum 
to the good times virus report) and this may create problems for my 
academic lumpencareer.

By the way, just to note, beer production is a manufacturing industry and 
therefore easily globalizeable.  My local bodega sells great beers from 
all over Africa (no doubt made under atrocious working conditions).  I 
agree with Marsh's previous point, some jobs are globalizeable and some are 
not, and that "services" is a problematic agglomeration for a whole lot 
of different things.

I suspect that some of the differences in views on globalization may come 
from geographic differences.  In the manufacturing belts, it probably 
looks pretty scary.  Here in New York, people's jobs aren't being 
threatened by employers moving abroad (with a few exceptions, like 
garments and some financial services like credit cards now done by 
telephone and mail).  The big threat is government downsizing, workfare, 
and a city policy that prioritizes financial jobs for people in 
Westchester and Long Island over manufacturing and blue-collar service 
jobs for people in the Bronx (New York deindustrialized because the city 
government de-zoned all the manufacturing areas long before people were 
talking about globalization).

I suspect that one effect of global competition (though also an effect of 
the shift to services and the general corporate attack) is to change 
which occupations and industries are part of the "core."  In New York, 
manufacturing wages are lower than in Hong Kong.  On the other hand, the 
transportation sector is doing stronger, as are some health care 
occupations (relative to other sectors, that is, not to twenty years ago) 
and some occupations in telecommunications.  I would contend (okay, Sid, 
call me on this one :) ) that the substitutablity of labor has become 
more of a determinant than sunk capital of which occupations and industries 
generate shareable rents.


Resistance is futile,
Tavis


On Thu, 15 May 1997, Marshall Feldman wrote:


> Yeah, but it can happen.  My understanding of the beer industry is that it
> used to be very localized.  Then a few majors took over.  Beer was mass
> produced and shipped in concentrate to local branches where water was added
> and the beer was canned.  Local breweries closed down.  Now there's a
> resurgence of local breweries, but their market share is small and
> production does not have to be local.  The "local" content is the recipe.
> For instance, I think Boston's Sam Adams is brewed under license in PA.
> 
> I wouldn't be surprised if some tortillas are shipped frozen across country.
> Maybe the Hispanic population in LA can tell the difference, but how come
> you can buy tortillas in Cleveland?

[PEN-L:9945] RE: Globalization

[Tavis Barr]

On Wed, 7 May 1997, D Shniad wrote:

> Tavis, you obviously haven't heard about the Virtual U model that is
> being promoted across North America and Europe.

Sure I have.  I just don't read about every half-assed high-tech gimmick 
and think, "This is the world of the future." Maybe when I do I'll drop 
out of politics and become a Buddhist monk.


Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:9944] Re: Tavis, you're *still* wrong

[Tavis Barr]

On Wed, 7 May 1997, Rosenberg, Bill wrote:

> Isn't the point that workers in those industries are feeling these 
> encroachments at the margins? There may be lots of them working in 
> those industries still, but their bargaining power is determined by 
> the steady loss of jobs, and threat of more, rather than what is 
> left.

Yes, but how many of those jobs are being lost to people halfway around 
the world, and how many to people halfway around the block?

Prost,
Tavis

[PEN-L:9943] Re: Tavis, you're *still* wrong

[Tavis Barr]

[I wear the title proudly. :) ]

On Wed, 7 May 1997, D Shniad wrote:

> Tavis:
> 
> My contention is that service markets aren't as globalizable as 
> manufacturing markets.
> 
> Sid:
> 
> I don't think this is anything more than a contention.

Allright, I'll use some data.  It comes from a data set I'm working on 
that studies employers in four different areas (New York, Kalamazoo, 
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh).  Admittedly it might be a non-random sample 
geographically, but it's what I have handy.  The question is "What is 
the main market for your firm's goods or services?" and the answers 
(weighted by firm size and to correct for industry oversampling) are:

The Neighborhood   40.2%
Metropolitan Area  42.1
National   10.1
International  7.6
[N=316]

For those in the service sector (SIC1=9), the answers are:

The Neighborhood   34.9%
Metropolitan Area  54.7
National   8.5
International  1.9
[N=106]

I don't have a big enough sample in manufacturing and telecommunications 
to get consistent results.  :(  There must be some big national marketing 
survey somewhere that has a similar question, though


> Tavis:
> 
> The same types of jobs you describe in telecommunications (operator 
> services) have their analogues in many other sectors: Claims processing 
> in health care, credit card and loan processing in banking, catalog sales 
> in retail trade.  They can all be moved anywhere around the country 
> (though I suspect that language difficulties at least would make it hard 
> to move them across borders).  
> 
> Sid:
> 
> The work doesn't necessarily involve speaking.  If it does, English is spoken 
> by folks across Canada, the U.S. and Britain, as well as by a great many 
> educated folk around the world; Spanish is spoken in Europe, Mexico and 
> South America, as well as across the U.S., etc.

C'mon, that's stretching it.  Would you trust non-Latino American clerical 
workers to process forms in Spanish?  

> But the key thing is that a great of this work is computer-based and doesn't 
> involve speaking at all.  The maquila-based postal sorting (by Spanish-
> speaking workers sorting mail that's located in Chicago) is prototypical of 
> what I'm describing.  By the same token, remote trouble analysis of the 
> phone system can be done in the same locale as where the trouble is or 
> across the world.  
> 
> It's not just low end jobs that we're talking about, either.  The Indian 
> software industry is state-of-the-art in sophistication, but it pays wages that 
> are a fraction of those paid software writers in Europe and North America.  

This just sounds like a column out of _Wired_ magazine. I could continue 
it and write up all these wonderful examples of the neat brain jobs that 
are being created by computerization and all of the menial jobs that 
they're replacing and how production is obsolete and the new economy is 
information based.  But gee whiz stories are just that.


> This is what makes Robert Reich's promotion of education, training and 
> skills such a meaningless response to capital's restructuring of work; capital 
> doesn't have to choose between high skills and high wages on the one hand 
> and low skills and low wages on the other.  It can have *both*.

Yes, yes, yes, but what does that have to do with globalization?  The 
same is true of the City University of New York replacing all its faculty 
with low-paid gradutate students, most of whom are from the City.

> Tavis:
> 
> However most jobs in health care (nursing and assistance, hospital clerical 
> and mainaintance work), banking (teller and sales work), and retail trade 
> (person-to-person sales, service) are much harder to move very far.
> 
> Sid:
> 
> You're over generalizing here, Tavis.  Hospital clerical work can be handled 
> in exactly the same manner as what I described in the phone industry.  It 
> can easily be provided at the end of a phone line or by forcing people 
> signing in or out of hospital to provide their personal information via a 
> computer screen. Banking tellers are going the way of the dodo bird.  At 
> least in Canada, their numbers are dropping precipitately (I doubt this is 
> unique to this country) as their ranks are replaced by computerized tellers 
> and ATMs.

You're over exaggerating, Sid.  When was the last time you checked into a 
hospital?  (Me, last October when I made a boboo with a utility knife and 
nearly sliced my thumb off).  I've temped at many clerical jobs in 
hospitals.  They consist of doing lots of bullshit for doctors (taking 
dictations, making tennis dates), xeroxing things to put in files, 
keeping track of patient rosters; I also had a job for a few months as the 
data entry clerk in inventory for a big hospital in Boston (Beth Israel).  
I'm sure many of the tasks (requisition forms, patient logs) could be 
slightly automated, with due thanks from a lot of clerical workers.  But 
most of the work is so

[PEN-L:9936] Well maybe I'm just possbly sorta kinda right Sid

[Tavis Barr]

Hmm... what response could I possibly have to such an assertive title?

Of course you can find examples of international outsourcing within any 
industry.  It's part of what firms attempt to do with their labor 
process: Deskill and standardize their inputs, then figure out how to 
expand the number of bidders for input goods as far as possible.  But my 
assertion is not about an effect within sectors (there is probably 
increasing globalization within almost all sectors, at least to some 
degree) but about an effect between sectors.  My contention is that 
service markets aren't as globalizable as manufacturing markets.

The same types of jobs you describe in telecommunications (operator 
services) have their analogues in many other sectors: Claims processing 
in health care, credit card and loan processing in banking, catalog sales 
in retail trade.  They can all be moved anywhere around the country 
(though I suspect that language difficulties at least would make it hard 
to move them across borders).  However most jobs in health care (nursing 
and assistance, hospital clerical and mainaintance work), banking (teller 
and sales work), and retail trade (person-to-person sales, service) are 
much harder to move very far.  I really don't know enough about 
telecommunications to know how the occupations break down.

I really don't know how this debate could advance any further without us 
pulling up statistics about occupational breakdowns within industries or 
the percentage of total revenues generated locally.  I'm not prepared at 
this point to come up with those, though I may at some point soon, just 
for the sake of research.

One of your points that I have no doubt is true is that firms are 
drastically increasing their use of outsourcing.  Here at Columbia 
they're beginning to contract out their cleaning and maintenance work
to Aramark as a wedge against the union.  Needless to say, all of the 
Aramark workers are local (though, granted, the majority of both the 
Columbia and Aramark workers are immigrants from Mexico, Central America, 
and the Carribean).  What is significant is not how far away the work is 
done, but that it is done outside the firm at all.

I guess the biggest question for me is the implications for organizing.  
If I thought the biggest problem of the moment were the globalization of 
work, then I would say that they key task for US labor organizers would 
be to fund democratic labor organizations in developing countries or 
joint campaigns with co-workers in Europe and Japan.  I think that'd be a 
great idea, but corporate restructuring has had other more important 
effects at home: (1) The standardization and deskilling of work, making 
workers more replaceable; (2) The smaller size of the immediate 
workplace, making production less codependent and hence individual 
workers less powerful, and also making workplaces more mobile.  This 
suggests to me that the major shift should not be toward cross-border 
organizing, but toward community-wide and industry-wide organization.

Give me Jobs with Justice over global Keynesianism any day.


Cheers,
Tavis


On Wed, 7 May 1997, D Shniad wrote:

> Tavis: 
> 
> "But with hardware services [the opposition is generally between hardware 
> on the one hand and services on the other] everything must be provided 
> locally, which means that it can't be shipped off or gotten from elsewhere. 
> This is really just sort of a tautology, but I think it's an important one that's 
> forgotten about when people wave the specter of runaway shops."
> 
> Sid: 
> 
> I don't know if we're just emphasizing different things here, Tavis, but I 
> don't agree that "it can't be shipped off or gotten from elsewhere."  The 
> classic illustration of the danger to local control is provided by something 
> that is already happening in mail sorting in the US Post Office.  I think I 
> posted this item several months back, but I think it bears repeating:
> 
> U.S. MAIL SORTING HANDLED 
> IN REYNOSA MAQUILADORA
> 
> Local 4325 of the American Postal Workers Union, located in 
> McAllen, Texas, has discovered that companies doing bulk mailings have 
> set up operations in Mexican maquiladoras to handle mail sorting work.  
> According to Cindy Martinez, president of Local 4325, one of the 
> companies -- San Diego-based Envisions -- recently opened a plant in 
> Reynosa, Mexico, just across the U.S.-Mexican border from McAllen.  The 
> plant currently employs 180 workers, but the company plans to employ as 
> many as 1,000 people by year's end.
> Envisions is a "pre-sort" house that prepares bulk mailings for 
> business customers.  These customers receive a discount from the U.S. 
> Postal Service for having their mailings pre-sorted and pre-coded.  
> Envisions takes in bulk business mail from companies located in Chicago 
> and Indianapolis.  The mail is then processed through remote encoding 
> technology, owned by the U.S. Postal Service and licensed to privat

[PEN-L:9935] RE: Globalization

[Tavis Barr]

On Tue, 6 May 1997, Laurie Dougherty wrote:

> This is related to the point Tavis is making.  While it's true that people tend to 
>use 
> services locally, it is not true that those services must be offered in any given 
> location.  Look at the inner cities which are lacking in many of the retail and 
> service outlets that exist in wealthier areas.  With deregulation of phone service, 
> this is more likely to happen - that phone service will, if not disappear, at least 
> deteriorate.  The same may happen in rural areas if the subsidy of rural phone 
> service ends.  Eventually the hardware requirements will shift.  This is more a 
> matter of competition for capital than labor market competition, but labor markets 
> will be afffected by it.

No disagreement here (except that in my hood there are fewer and fewer 
hospitals and schools, but there's a store on every corner offering 
beepers, cell phones, phone cards, and cheap calls to the DR).


> In Boston, because of institutions like Harvard and MIT or Massachusetts General
> Hospital, higher education and health care are considered an export industry.  
> Under the pressure of managed care the big hospitals are consolidating.  At the 
> same time, smaller hospitals all over the state are closing.  Many kinds of 
> business services are internationalized.  There may be different dynamics 
> operating in service industries, but they still exist within a globally integrating 
> economy.

This is true.  But it's not the same kind of export competition.  
Harvard, MIT, and Mass general don't argue to their workers that they 
have to lower wages to compete with Berkeley or Oxford.  None of these 
places are threatening to close down and move their work to Mexico.  
Although people come from all over the world to go to Boston hospitals, 
most patients are still from New England, and nobody's out pitching the 
cheapest services to customers in Australia.  Competition is in the form 
of quality and innovation, and that matters a lot for worker bargaining 
power.  As for business services, well, I worked as a temp in Boston for 
several years, and most of those jobs were in FIRE firms.  Almost all of 
the client base of these offices was in New England if not in Eastern 
Mass.  So again, although the companies were often international, the 
markets were usually local or at most regional.


Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:9906] Re: more on globalization

[Tavis Barr]

On Mon, 5 May 1997, James Devine wrote:

> the point is that the US economy has changed and is changing,
> seemingly at an accelerated pace (whereas you had something like that the
> role of exports was stable). 

My pocket almanac figures tell a different story (sorry, they don't have 
GDP before 1980 so I have to use GNP -- they're very close):

Year  X/GNP   M/GNP
1960   3.8%2.9%
1970   4.2 4.0
1980   8.0 8.9
1990   7.0 8.8
1995   8.010.2


Maybe I'm missing something, but I see a huge jump in the 1970s and a bit 
of flailing around since with small upward drift.

> Further, simply the fact that the US has a large economy means that it will
> have a relatively low openness index forever (as long as transportation
> costs are positive rather than zero). After all, in some places in the
> Netherlands, if they buy bread, it counts as an "Import" since it comes
> from Belgium or Germany or France. Whereas if someone in Illinois buys
> something from Missouri (across the Mississippi River) it does not count 
> that way. 

Granted, and well put.  But I think we may see trade growth level off as 
manufacturing continues to decline.  Just a wild prediction.


Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:9905] Re: Further to Tavis

[Tavis Barr]

Sid, let me start from a different vantage point rather than respond bit 
by bit, hopefully for the sake of clarity.  I agree that there is massive 
global consolidation in telecom, perhaps more than in any other sector.  
I agree that competition may be becoming more intense in the local 
markets, and that it will be a handful of enormous international companies 
competing with each other.  These are just empirical facts.  My point 
is: It's still the local market.

The substance of what I'm saying is more political at its roots.  The 
globalization argument usually runs that unions can't push up wages 
and governments can't impose regualtions or taxes because companies will 
just ship the work off to another country, or it runs that companies 
can't charge huge markups because there's an alternative product from 
another country.

But with hardware services [as opposed to long distance services or 
various internet services, I think that's what you were asking about with 
your little "?"] everything must be provided locally, which means that it 
can't be shipped off or gotten from elsewhere.  This is really just sort 
of a tautology, but I think it's an important one that's forgotten about 
when people wave the specter of runaway shops.

The point is, people usually argue: The economy is becoming more global 
=> we have to compete with workers in Thailand who make 40c an hour => 
our wages will inevitably go down.  While this may be true of unskilled 
manufacturing and perhaps FIRE, it is not true of most other sectors, and 
the growth of services may produce just the opposite effect.  However 
slack or intense the competition is, workers in Minnesota who provide 
telephone services will be forced into competition only with other 
workers in Minnesota, even if one is working for British telecom and the 
other for Telefonica de Espana.

Is this making more sense?

Hopeful,
Tavis


On Mon, 5 May 1997, D Shniad wrote:

> Tavis, let's go through this slowly:
> 
> "It is in this sense that I am calling much of telecommunications local 
> (though you're right, I hesitated before putting it in there): 
> 
> Hardware services [?] must be provided locally.  Consumers must choose 
> between local providers, regardless of who owns them.  For most of us, this 
> amounts to choosing between [opting for the sole?] one local provider.  
> There's a bit more competition in cellular service, but not much.  This is 
> certainly less true of long distance providers -- but then they too charge 
> different rates in different areas."
> 
> The next round of change in telecom is coming down the pipe right now: 
> competition in local service, with the biggest of the big transnationals doing 
> the competing. This is part of what is being promoted in international trade 
> agreements -- the right of behemoths like AT&T and British Telecom to 
> provide whatever service they want in whatever market they want, free of 
> any social obligations.  So while your argument about local provisioning 
> may have held true in the past, it is less and less the case today.
> 
> The LA Times article shows that the focus of transnational capital in 
> telecommunications in Latin America (like the focus in North America and 
> Western Europe) is on providing local service links for the largest 
> transnational companies.  AT&T, MCI Communications Corp. and British 
> Telecom did not form an unprecedented alliance with Telefonica de Espana 
> with an eye to providing local service via expensive infrastructure 
> investments so that impoverished peasants and workers can talk on the 
> phone at affordable rates. 
> 
> The competition for this corporate market could become intense, as it did in 
> the market for long distance service.  But then developments in the sector 
> must be analyzed over time: after a period of intense competition in 
> Western Europe and North America, market concentration in long distance 
> service is increasing as it becomes controlled by a shrinking number of 
> enormous oligopolies.
> 
> "The more general point is this: Firms make profits by generating rents.  
> They seek to minimize their own-firm demand elasticities.  If they are less 
> and less able to do this in manufacturing, then they will move out of 
> manufacturing and into services.  This is not a function of the concentration 
> of capital, but of substitutability within product and labor markets."
> 
> I guess the question is what steps they can take to minimize their own-firm 
> demand elasticities in manufacturing and in services.  The problem in the 
> area of manufacturing appears to be that in the absence of market power it 
> is difficult to maintain rents for undifferentiated commodities.  Moving to 
> services is only a stop-gap unless steps can be taken to prevent the onset of 
> competition or to offset it in the longer term with the formation of 
> oligopolies.  
> 
> This is exactly what is happening in communications around the world.  My

[PEN-L:9898] re: what is the opposite of globalization?

[Tavis Barr]

On Mon, 5 May 1997, James Devine wrote:

> I don't know. I calculated the degree of "openness" or globalization of the
> US economy (which is simply the average of imports and exports divided by
> gross domestic product; development economists use this kind of measure of
> openness all the time). The simple index rises, steadily but with a
> steepening curve, from 4 per cent in 1959 to over 12 per cent in 1996.

Which is to say, not much, relative to the rest of the world.

Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:9897] Re: what is the opposite of globalization?

[Tavis Barr]

On Mon, 5 May 1997, D Shniad wrote:

> Unless I misunderstand what it is you're arguing, Tavis, I think you're
> dead wrong. Telecommunications is based on local markets?  There was a
> piece in the LA Times recently about the big North American telecom
> companies making an unprecedented move on Latin America, with an eye to
> servicing the biggest of the big companies there.  This is merely one
> example.  Please elaborate on this statement.

Very well.  It's not a question of the concentration of capital or the 
fact that the same firm may be serving the entire hemisphere.  What I have 
in mind is this:

Part (if not most) of the globalization idea is that firms now compete 
across borders.  What this means is that they face higher own-firm supply 
and demand elasticities because both firms and consumers can substitute much 
more widely than before.  This is true both in the product market (pants 
from New York or pants from Ecuador) and in the labor market (locate your 
firm in New York or locate your firm in Ecuador).

This phenomenon does not directly depend on whether the plants in New York 
and Ecuador are owned by the same people.  For example, if transportation 
costs were prohibitive (say this was fresh fish) the same firm would have 
to produce in New York for the New York market and in Ecuador for the 
Ecuador market.  Similarly, McDonalds stores in New York compete with 
Burger King stores in New York, but not Burger King stores in New Jersey, 
let alone Ecuador.

It is in this sense that I am calling much of telecommunications local 
(though you're right, I hesitated before putting it in there): 
Hardware services must be provided locally.  Consumers must choose 
between local providers, regardless of who owns them.  For most of us, 
this amounts to choosing between one local provider.  There's a bit more 
competition in cellular service, but not much.  This is certainly 
less true of long distance providers -- but then they too charge different 
rates in different areas.

The more general point is this: Firms make profits by generating rents.  
They seek to minimize their own-firm demand elasticities.  If they are 
less and less able to do this in manufacturing, then they will move out 
of manufacturing and into services.  This is not a function of the 
concentration of capital, but of substitutability within product and 
labor markets.

Is that dead wrong?


Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:9890] Re: what is the opposite of globalization?

[Tavis Barr]

I guess I'd have a slightly different answer.  The autocentric economy 
seems derivative of the postwar import-substitutionist economy, which 
nobody is really doing much of anymore.  Deregulation is happening almost 
at gunpoint.  Manufacturing is becoming unambiguously more global.

On the other hand, the growing service sector is largely based on 
local markets: Health care, retail and wholesale trade, transportation, 
telecommunications.  The Japanese government's orientation toward these 
industries in the late 1980s probably explains a good part of why the 
Japanese economy is less and less export dependent.  Even without such a 
policy, the US economy seems to be maintaining a stable level of 
import/export dependence.  I think this is the major countervailing force 
against globalization today.

Cheers,
Tavis


On Mon, 5 May 1997, James Devine wrote:

> Doug asks: what is the opposite of globalization?
> 
> To my mind, the opposite of globalization is the autocentric economy, where
> (on the level of the economy as a whole, not for individual capitalists)
> wages are treated as a source of demand and most investment goods are
> purchased domestically. This economy's main sources of demand and
> prosperity are domestic in nature. (It should be noticed that the
> "autocentric" economy represents a collective good: individual capitalists
> usually prefer to cut wages, even though it might hurt aggregate demand.
> Thus, this type of economy is rare, depending on such conjunctural factors
> as barriers to globalization (like tariffs and capital controls) and
> Keynesian stabilization.)
> 
> A globalized or dependent economy sees wages primarily as a cost, while
> investment goods are largely imported. Prosperity comes primarily from net
> export demand. I agree with Doug that a small country like New Zealand has
> a hard time being anything but globalized. What's happened is a change in
> the nature of that economy's globalization. 
> 
> This definition comes from Samir Amin and the dependency literature. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> in pen-l solidarity,
> 
> Jim Devine   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ.
> 7900 Loyola Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045-8410 USA
> 310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950
> "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way
> and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
> 
> 

[PEN-L:9871] Re: US Steel and Finance Capital

[Tavis Barr]

On Sat, 3 May 1997, Michael Perelman wrote:


> Tavis, I suspect that we have to sort our two different trends.  First,
> the economy as a whole has grown, so we might expect from extrapolation,
> a growth in production and non-production workers.  

Right.  The point is that the production workforce has grown much faster 
than the non-production workforce (though in terms of total employment, 
this amounts to a small decline over the last 30 years, something like 
20% in the non-production workforce in goods-producing industries, versus a 
decline of over 50% in the production workforce).

> Now consider a firm
> like Nike.  Their production workers are abroad, but many of their
> non-production workers are in the U.S.

But how typical is Nike?  As far as firms who invest in OECD countries, 
we would expect that this investment is balanced out by OECD investment 
in the US, so that there are non-production workers abroad controlling 
production workers in the US to balance out the equation.  As far as 
firms who invest in LDC's, well, there just aren't enough of them to make 
up for all those lost production jobs in the OECD countries.  I don't 
think it describes what's really going on.


In strudel,
Tavis

[PEN-L:9863] Re: US Steel and Finance Capital

[Tavis Barr]

On Fri, 2 May 1997, Anthony P D'Costa wrote:

> But price fixing still possible even if competition has increased.  steel
> supplies are not that elastic.  After getting rid of obsolete capacity the
> overall supply situation is somewhat belanced but around the world demand
> is increasing and periodic shortages are common.  Price gouging is more
> common and US steel companies (the large ones are notorious for that).
> There will be supply shortages in South East Asia, hence the Japanese are
> reluctant to put out the blast furnaces.  

Which is merely to say that true competition is not much like textbook 
competition.  Firms spend money seeking and generating large rents and 
depend on these rents for their profitability.  The decrease in firms' 
abilities to isolate themselves is a relative phenomenon, not an absolute 
one.

Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:9862] Re: US Steel and Finance Capital

[Tavis Barr]

On Fri, 2 May 1997, Michael Perelman wrote:


> Yes, indeed.  The industrialsts did too much competing for the financial
> types, so they remade the economy at the turn of the century through
> trust, cartels and outright monopolies.  In many cases, it took a
> different mentality to succeed at the productionist side than to win at
> the finance side. 

Whoa.  Wait a minute.  I thought we were talking about the steel industry, 
not the economy.  Yes, I'll buy that steel, auto, oil, tobacco, and maybe 
a couple of other industries turned into textbook-style oligopolies 
or monopolies in the first years of the century.  But that's not the whole 
economy.  What about garments, paper, glass, food service, wholesale 
trade, agriculture, etc., etc.


> > then, have firms not dropped non-production workers?  
> 
> But they have.

I went to BLS and checked this.  You're right about steel.  The production 
workforce (mils and blast furnaces; sorry, calculating hours was too 
difficult) was 432,200 in 1958-62 and 130,300 in 1996 (~30%).  The 
non-production workforce was 102,000 in 58-62 and 38,400 today (~38%).

In comparison, for goods producing industries as a whole, the 
production worforce was 15,398,000 in 58-62 and 17,242,000 in 1996 
(+12%), whereas the non-production workforce was 4,735,000 in 58-62 and 
7,017,000 in 1996 (+45%).  

So the pattern as a whole is that companies in manufacturing are adding on 
huge amounts of non-production workers (and even in Steel, they've become 
a larger percentage of the workforce).  Many are in sales, which kind of 
makes sense, but the growth of clerical work remains unstemmed, which 
doesn't, unless you mbelieve (1) that computers generate more clerical 
work (e.g., more things need to be kept track of), (2) that they don't 
improve productivity, or (3) that they haven't been implemented very well.

Sorry.  I keep harping back on the same question.

> There is a great debate over the degree to which computers have and will
> increase efficiency in the production side.  

My point exactly: There's much less research about their effect on 
non-production work, where you'd think they'd have the most effect.

> Ed Wolff has recently shown
> that much of the increase in competitiveness in manufacturing has come
> via contracting out business services.

Business services meaning accounting, etc.?  (Just checking).  That's 
interesting.  But the non-production workforce in manufacturing (as a 
percentage of total economy-wide employment) is almost stable while the 
production workforce continues to shrink rapidly.

Okay, I've said the same thing about ten times, I'll shut up now. :)


Cheers,
Tavis
 

[PEN-L:9822] Re: US Steel and Finance Capital

[Tavis Barr]

Michael--

Your piece on US Steel was interesting.  Thanks.  It raised a bunch of 
questions, though:

You describe one view of production (unit cost-minimizing) as "industrial" 
and the other (revenue maximizing through rents) as "financial."  While 
the classification has some aesthetic appeal (your industrial capitalist 
would spend more time in the shop cutting tools and your financial 
capitalist in the field analyzing and influencing markets), it seems to 
me that the difference really just reflects a difference between 
competitive and monopolistic behavior.  Both capitalists are maximizing 
markups times quantity over capital; the first one assumes little market 
power and the second one a lot.  They certainly adopt different choices 
of technique, and the "financial" capitalist adopts one that is grossly 
inefficient.  But the "financial" capitalist is still solving a 
profit-maximization problem based on steel production, not on speculative 
activity.  So it isn't necessarily an explanation of why the nature of 
work in the steel industry might have changed, unless there 
are huge numbers of market analysts, which I doubt.

Getting back to Louis' original point: It seems an interesting hypothesis 
that steel companies have switched their operations toward market control 
and away from production techniques.  Your case for the 1920s and 1930s 
seems clear.  In the 80s and 90s, though, the new rage is these 
mini-mills that produce as much output with a fraction (like a tenth) of 
the production workers of the previous mills.  As far as I am aware, 
there are a number of these mills and price-fixing has become much more 
difficult.  So we may be back to more "competitive" conditions.  Why, 
then, have firms not dropped non-production workers?  Is there more R&D 
to do?  Have computer advancements not really been implemented in 
non-production work?  I'm just being pesky.

Cheers,
Tavis



On Thu, 1 May 1997, Michael Perelman wrote:

> In the extract I posted, the technology in question was from the 1920s and
> the charge came from Fortune magazine, writing only a few decades after
> the formation of U.S. Steel.
> 
> Under Carnegie, new technology came at a furious pace, so much so that
> Morgan and others wanted to buy out Carnegie who was undermining the value
> of their invested assets.  At one point, he destroyed an unfinished
> factory because he had just learnt of a better technology.
> 
> Under U.S. Steel, innovation more or less ceased.  Some of the Youngstown
> plants shut down in the early 70s predated World War I.
> 
> My point was that the company ceased to have a productionist mentality and
> adopted a more banker-like mentality.
> 
>  -- 
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
> 
> Tel. 916-898-5321
> E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 

[PEN-L:9793] Re: IB Systems (was Globaloney)

[Tavis Barr]

On Thu, 1 May 1997, Louis N Proyect wrote:


> Isn't it possible that the growth of a "non-production workforce" in
> manufacturing simply reflects the transition from some of these companies
> out of manufacturing into finance? Isn't the purpose of US Steel to
> enhance the share value of its equity rather than make steel?

That's one I hadn't thought of.  I don't know enough details to judge it, 
but on the face of it it seems unlikely.  Transferring into finance 
doesn't so much mean that firms transfer out of manufacturing.  After 
all, the best way to maximize share values is to produce good steel cheap.  
What's really happened is that these firms place their new investments in 
diverse portfolios, which can be taken care of by a handful of portfolio 
managers, instead of, say, steel.  The rising ratio of production workers 
comes from technological change, which produces more and more output with 
fewer and fewer production workers, but there hasn't been a similar trend 
in non-production work.

It was Braverman's theory that as production becomes more coordinated and 
deskilled, fewer workers are required on the shop floor and more workers 
are required to manage control processes.  But it's exactly these types 
of control processes (inventory, quality, orders, auditing) that the 
computer is supposed to be automating.  It seems like there's a missing 
piece of the puzzle somewhere.


Befuddled,
Tavis

[PEN-L:9793] Re: IB Systems (was Globaloney)

[Tavis Barr]

On Thu, 1 May 1997, Louis N Proyect wrote:


> Isn't it possible that the growth of a "non-production workforce" in
> manufacturing simply reflects the transition from some of these companies
> out of manufacturing into finance? Isn't the purpose of US Steel to
> enhance the share value of its equity rather than make steel?

That's one I hadn't thought of.  I don't know enough details to judge it, 
but on the face of it it seems unlikely.  Transferring into finance 
doesn't so much mean that firms transfer out of manufacturing.  After 
all, the best way to maximize share values is to produce good steel cheap.  
What's really happened is that these firms place their new investments in 
diverse portfolios, which can be taken care of by a handful of portfolio 
managers, instead of, say, steel.  The rising ratio of production workers 
comes from technological change, which produces more and more output with 
fewer and fewer production workers, but there hasn't been a similar trend 
in non-production work.

It was Braverman's theory that as production becomes more coordinated and 
deskilled, fewer workers are required on the shop floor and more workers 
are required to manage control processes.  But it's exactly these types 
of control processes (inventory, quality, orders, auditing) that the 
computer is supposed to be automating.  It seems like there's a missing 
piece of the puzzle somewhere.


Befuddled,
Tavis

[PEN-L:9762] IB Systems (was Globaloney)

[Tavis Barr]

I had a job doing something like this in high school.  It was in a small but 
growing shop that made instruments for keeping vials at a certain 
temperature.  I put together an integrated business system (based on a 
standard format) that calculated parts, labor time, and sale dates, 
tracked each work from scratch to UPS, calculated the labor bill, 
calculated inventory and reordering (with a program for doing adjustments 
after a manual check), kept track of backlogs, and even balanced the 
checkbooks.  The sales person entered an order, it would appear on a 
list of orders; an assembler would be given a sheet that printed out 
automatically, including a bill of materials and expected labor time; 
he/she would check off that the machine was complete and 
give the machine and a form to the packager, the packager would ship it off 
and check off a box; I would put the form into the computer (once I'd 
finished programming the system) with about 10 keystrokes, and it would 
calculate everything from the profit rate to the purchase orders for 
parts suppliers to the UPS bill. 

What amazes me is this: The system that I put together probably cut the 
non-production workforce (people with the fairly mundane jobs of keeping 
track of inventory and filling out and keeping track of purchase orders 
and payments on bills) by a factor of three or four (no layoffs 
necessary since it was a growing company though I'm sure I would have 
been a hatchet boy in another situation).  This seems the natural 
effect of any IB system. And yet it's the non-production workforce in 
manufacturing that's been growing and the production  workforce that's 
been shrinking.  Any thoughts?  Is it that most businesses simply haven't 
implemented IB systems (I have this impression, or at least the 
impression that they're not as fully implemented as they could be)?  Or 
is there a really exploding ratio of non-production work that's simply 
been tamed by the computer revolution?


Curious,
Tavis


On Wed, 30 Apr 1997, D Shniad wrote:

> SAP it is, Louis.  In promoting its worldwide application, I hope you
> qualified your argument a bit. (Please send me anything you have on it,
> BTW.)
> 
> Sid Shniad
> 
> > This sounds like SAP, a client-server database application from a German
> > company that ties together inventory, purchasing, general ledger, payroll,
> > personnel, etc. My plan for socialism is to install SAP globally. That was
> > a piece of the software that I posted a while back in my debate with Robin
> > Hahnel.
> > 
> > Louis Proyect
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue, 29 Apr 1997, D Shniad wrote:
> > 
> > > I would like to see some support for this categorical statement that
> > > seems widely accepted here on Pen.  I heard a management presentation
> > > from executives at BC Tel that described a $43 million system they're
> > > putting in place that will integrate all activity within the company on a 
> > > single data base.  This means that service reps will type in a customer's 
> > > specs, which will generate ordering data for materials, schedule workers' 
> > > time to do the related work, link up with accounting, etc.
> > > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> 

[PEN-L:9750] Re: M-I: Re the Rust belt

[Tavis Barr]

Unemployment rates do not tell the story about deindustrialization.  I'm 
using an extraction from the CPS data set that shows that as much as a 
quarter of the increase in wage variance at the state level in the 1980s 
can be explained by deindustrialization.  Preliminary evidence from the 
NLSY suggests that this increased variance is largely caused by 
increasingly divergent permanent wage paths (i.e., wage-experience 
profiles). There is also research (I think by Ann Huff Stevens) showing 
that workers who involuntarily lose their jobs from plant closings take 
something like a ten percent permanent wage cut.  I imagine 
deindustrialized cities would be great places for a service sector boom, 
because you have all these skilled people willing to work for much lower 
wages.

Pittsburgh may look rosy, but have any of y'all spent time in Detroit lately?


Cheers,
Tavis


On Wed, 30 Apr 1997, Louis Proyect wrote:

> Gary McLennan:
> 
> > A leading
> >right wing economist Terry McCrann has argued that the layoffs were
> >necessary and that anyway, like in USA, the sacked workers would get jobs in
> >the service industries.  He claims that unemployment in the former American
> >steel towns is now 3-4%. He writes
> >
> >"The old industrial jobs that were destroyed have been replaced with better,
> >more sustainable and more meaningful jobs in service industries.  This was
> >possible only because of the enormous flexibility of the American economy"
> >
> > Is he correct in this?  What has happened over the American rust belt?  A
> >comment on this plus data would be greatly appreciated.
> >
> 
> 
> Louis P.:
> 
> This seems like a question that Doug can supply the most meaningful answer
> to, but I will say something based on impressions from the mass media. A
> city like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is offered up as an example of one that
> has made the transition from the rust belt--it was a major producer of
> steel--to service industries. There is no question that Pittsburgh has seen
> a steady increase in jobs in the financial services, etc. The problem is
> that a 35 year old steelworker with 15 years experience in a foundry is not
> likely to get a job programming financial applications, nor a job answering
> area code 800 phone calls to tell people their current balance. Those jobs
> will go to recent high-school graduates. I suspect that the tens of
> thousands of steelworkers who lost their jobs in the 70s and 80s are working
> at Walmart, Sears, etc. for $8 to $10 an hour. If Doug can't come up with
> some statistics on this, I might take a trip over to the library and do some
> digging myself since the question has a bearing on American politics as well
> as Australian politics. This has to do with Clinton's claim that the
> American economy is healthy. While the stock-market is booming, I sense that
> there is much misery in the "rust belt" no matter the unemployment rate.
> 
> 
> 
> 

[PEN-L:9574] Re: German liberalism

[Tavis Barr]

I don't know anything about the Austrian School bit.  Sympathy for 
English liberalism would indeed be surprising, since it goes against the 
grain of everything Foucault had written.  As you know, he spends a lot 
of time both in Discipline and Punish and in the History of Sexuality V1 
describing the way enlightenment thought was used to codify inappropriate 
behavior and create acceptable boundaries of social discourse and acceptable 
notions of freedom -- in effect, taking away freedom in the name of 
liberty -- that would continue current relations of power.  

Foucault never held the state as a center of power above, say, 
psychoanalytic terminology; while, in Discipline and Punish, he is 
talking about the way state power is used to imprison people, he does 
not view the state as using behavioral psychology any more than 
behavioral psychology using the state.  One could, indeed, do a 
Foucauldian analysis of the discourse of the market and talk about how 
neoclassical notions of freedom -- the ability of individuals to buy and 
sell at prices they desire -- were created by those with property and 
defined explicitly so that the dscourse of property would not be 
questioned.  Given that Foucault was a Marxist earlier in his life, it 
would be amazing if he did not see this.

Do you know what Miller was referring to?

Curious,
Tavis



On Mon, 21 Apr 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

 
> Two footnotes:  (2) In his book on Foucault, James Miller says that
> Foucault developed, late in his life, a serious sympathy in Austrian
> economics and English liberalism as limits to state power, and strategies
> for maximizing the play of individual "will" (spectres of Nietzsche).

[PEN-L:9569] Re: FWD: IMPORTANT !!! READ RIGHT AWAY!!!!

[Tavis Barr]

It may or may not be a hoax (though my inclination is that it is).  While 
it is more or less impossible to send a virus as an email message, it is 
possible to send a virus as an email attachment with some email 
programs; for example, a viewer might recognize an attachment with a ".com" 
extension as a DOS executable file and execute it upon viewing.  The 
general lesson there is, don't execute an attachment unless 
you know the person who sent it.

Perhaps more indicative is the fact that the original message is 
unsigned.  It is unwise to take at face value (and bad netiquette to 
forward) a message about a virus unless it has been forwarded by a 
credible system administrator.

I bet this isn't the last we'll be seeing of this message. :(


YFT[Deleting all system files, please wait...],
Tavis




On Fri, 18 Apr 1997 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> Do not forward this message to anyone. The message itself is the scam.
> Email cannot execute a virus. A Microsoft Word file attached to an email
> can do lots of things to Word and Word files, but only if you open it. (And
> anyone using Word 6 or later can install free Word Macro protection as easy
> as abc.
> 
> The scam is the time it takes people to deal with this supposedly friendly
> "warning." God I wish people would learn how to deal with their computers.
> 
> Email cannot run a virus. It is harmless. Get a clue.
> 
> 
> >> Subject: FWD: IMPORTANT !!! READ RIGHT AWAY
> >> Mime-Version: 1.0
> >> Content-Type: text/plain
> >> Content-Disposition: inline
> >>
> >>
> >>  --
> >> Subject: IMPORTANT  READ RIGHT AWAY!
> >> Date: Tuesday, April 08, 1997 11:03AM
> >>
> >>
> >> > ATTENTION INTERNET AND ONLINE USERS..
> >> > Be on the lookout for this email subject AOL4FREE.com.  It will bring
> >> > lots of heart ache when it destroys your system files as you open it for
> >> > viewing.  Delete it IMMEDIATELY!
> >> >
> >> > THERE IS A NEW AOL SCAM."It is essential that this problem be
> >> reconciled
> >> as
> >> > soon as possible.  A few hours ago, I opened an E-mail that had the
> >> subject
> >> > heading of aol4free.com   Within seconds of opening it, a window
> >> appeared
> >> > and began to display my files that were being deleted.  I immediately
> >> shut down  my computer, but it was too late.  This virus wiped me out.  It
> >> ate
> >> the Anti-Virus Software that comes with the Windows '95 Program along
> >> with
> >> > F-Prot AVS.  Neither was able to detect it.  Please be careful and send
> >> this to as many people as possible, so maybe this new virus can be
> >> eliminated.
> >> >
> >> > FORWARD this to as many people as you care about]
> >>
> >>
> >> __
> >> This e-mail message is subject to attorney-client privilege and contains
> >> information intended only for the person(s) named above.  If you have
> >> received this transmission in error, notify us immediately. Destroy the
> >> original message and all copies.
> >>
> >>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Blair Sandler
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> 
> 

[PEN-L:9183] Re: Foucault

[Tavis Barr]

On Wed, 26 Mar 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

> I must have missed something. Who spat on Foucault, called him rubbish?

It wasn't you, Doug, it was somebody who responded to your post saying 
something like, "Why bother reading Foucault?"  I should save these 
things before I post, I guess.  

> Tavis, your post was excellent; ACT-UP is an admirable organization. I had
> a long chat with one of their drug experts a few years ago - though no MD,
> he really got to know his stuff. Stanley Aronowitz should be so
> knowledgeable. But organizations on the ACT-UP model - like WAC and WHAM!
> in NYC - have had a hard time sustaining themselves. Is that a limit of
> nonhierarchical anti-instutionalizing micropolitics? AIDS is still with us,
> but ACT-UP barely is.

I think I'd stick to a materialist analysis for ACT UP and WHAM! and 
explain WAC a bit differently.  To get the latter out of the way, as well 
as QN, I think basically these groups looked at ACT UP and were impressed 
by the theater and tactics but never realized (at least collectively) 
that you had to have a political mission that such tactics were 
achieving.  WAC had a a general mission to combat sexism and no real 
consensus, as far as I could tell, of what that meant strategically.  
Great drum corps though. Similarly, QN was initially formed to combat a 
national wave of bashings in the summer of 1990, but quickly lost sight 
of its original mission and started seeing itself as an organization to 
promote visibility.  Kiss-ins and postering men having sex are a lot of 
fun, but they aren't a political strategy.

I think WHAM! was basically formed in response to the wave of attacks on 
clinics by Operation Rescue, and died out when those attacks subsided.  
They did have an impressive campaign beginning to fight breast cancer in 
much the same way that ACT UP fights AIDS, but unfortunately the group 
was already in its nadir when that campaign was started and it never 
really solidified into a solid organizational vision.  There is still a 
group of about a dozen or so women that meets every two weeks and engages 
in actions, but it's just the cadrified core of that could have been a 
much larger organization had history worked out slightly differently.

Okay, now ACT UP:  One thing the group had going for it was that it was 
really the first group to stand up and fight AIDS politically.  This 
meant that a lot of fairly wealthy gay white men gave an awful lot of 
money for the group to function.  It also meant that the group had an odd 
kind of bourgeois respectability even as they were being in-your-face.  
Meanwhile, two things have happened: First, a tremendous range of 
political AIDS organization has spun off, and the less radical ones are 
much more likely to get the wealthy GWM bucks.  Second, AIDS has shifted 
to being predominantly a disease borne by people of color -- even among 
gay men, 7 out of 10 new infections are among men of color.

This means a whole lot of things.  First of all, it leaves a lot of 
visibility barriers left that ACT UP never broke nor could have broken: 
The visibility of IV drug users or their lovers and former lovers living 
in neighborhoods with no jobs, few resources, no insurance, no knowledge 
of how to gain access to specialized government programs, shitty 
hospitals, etc., etc., etc.  Second, it's just a group of people that has 
a lot less time and money to organize, in part because many are sick 
before they know their HIV status.  Third, ACT UP has done a poor job 
reaching out beyond the gay community, although other organizations such 
as Housing Works and Stand Up Harlem have found ways to combine social 
services with political action fairly effectively and have built stable 
and growing organizations.

I think ACT UP is also a victim of success on two counts.  First is that 
the group has transformed the notion of what it means to have a medical 
afflication (at least for PWA's; now if only someone would start 
organizing the same thing for people with cancer), stopped authoritarian 
public health measures at least for the time being, completely transformed 
the drug approval process, and gotten a certian amount of social 
insurance (unfortunately only for PWAs).  Second is that the mainstream 
media is running around touting "a cure for AIDS" and people will be 
pretty complacent for a couple of years until their combo therapies start 
crashing.

I guess my basic answer, then, is that the group is a victim of the 
general level of consciousness and material conditions, and its slow 
decline does not necessarily mean that it did anything wrong.  Though of 
course (viz. #3 above) the group did make mistakes.


> 
> >It is possible that the right stew of Marx, Gramsci and Chomsky could
> >come up with a basis of understanding discourse that is firmly grounded
> >in materialism.  But it hasn't happened yet, at least not in a way that
> >incorporates the many innovative ideas about seizing language

[PEN-L:9126] Foucault

[Tavis Barr]

Okay, to used a mixed metaphor, I'll bite this thread.  I have a 
love/hate relationship with Foucault's work that includes both a lot of 
respect and a lot of problems.  I think Foucault deserves our respect if 
for nothing else because he was a political activist who was out on the 
streets confronting cops, helping prisoners organize themselves and speak 
out, and fully immersed in gay and lesbian grassroots activism.  This 
is more than one can say of most other Pomo authors and, unfortunately, 
of most people on Pen-L for that matter.  I think it's grossly unfair to 
just dsimiss him with a comment of "rubbish."

Foucault's main influence on today's lesbian and gay movement is probably 
his conception of power.  For Foucault, power is mainly exercised 
through control over discourse: People in power control how our lives are 
spoken about and what options we are allowed to declare for ourselves.  
The objective of people whose power is taken from them is to find ways to 
speak up and to point to the contradictions in the dominant discourse as 
a way of exploding it.

This type of thinking has had a temendous influence on the AIDS activist 
movement.  At the beginning of the epidemic, people with AIDS were talked 
about through the discourse of public health, and policies that were most 
widely thrown out were those of control (quarantine, contact tracing, 
etc.).  Through the process of self-organization and speaking out in various 
ways, people with AIDS (fka, "AIDS victims") began to be seen as faces 
and human beings.  They began to appear in unexpected places demanding 
things on their behalf. Tactics in AIDS activism have often centered 
around finding ways to poke holes in public discussion, whether through 
embarrassing people in high places, getting arrested for doing 
"reasonable" things, or simply rasing spectacles where bourgeois 
propriety (and the law) would not have them.  The discouse now focuses on 
treatments for PWAs and support for people in high-risk groups.

Thinking about activism this way is not a substitute for a materialist 
analysis of AIDS or anything else.  ACT UP has always made some clear 
materialist points: Our main enemies are drug companies who do research 
on a for-profit basis, ignoring promising but unprofitable therapies and 
charging tens of thousands of dollars a year for the drugs they do 
develop (I and 72 other people were arrested yesterday for blocking 
access to the New York Stock Exchange in protest of drug prices).  Our 
other big enemy is the for-profit health care system and we are very 
clear on why the US has no universal health coverage.  People in ACT UP 
also have a very clear understanding of how corporations control public 
research funding and the state in general.

It is problematic that Foucault saw his analysis in contradiction to 
materialism in many ways.  Primarily, his analysis of the "repressive 
hypothesis" in the first volume of _The History of Sexuality_ describes the 
repression of homosexuality as waning throughout the century because the 
discourse around homosexuality was expoloding, and he offers this piece 
in response to materialist critics.  This is a very different history 
from, say, John D'Emilio's _Capitalism and Gay Identity_, which 
describes material repression of homosexuality in response to the growth 
of gay and lesbian households in the early twentieth century. I side 
unambiguously with D'Emilio, but I also think that Foucault's points 
about exploding discourse are worth tackling because understanding 
consciousness is a big part of understanding the subjective element of 
making history.

It is possible that the right stew of Marx, Gramsci and Chomsky could 
come up with a basis of understanding discourse that is firmly grounded 
in materialism.  But it hasn't happened yet, at least not in a way that 
incorporates the many innovative ideas about seizing language that Foucault 
held.  Foucault wrote at a time when the relationship between Marxism and 
feminism was still being redefined, and when Marxist discourse about 
homosexuality was barely existent.  Many marxists still have bad sexual 
politics.  Meanwhile, Foucault has influenced many lesbian and gay 
academics and political activists.  It is partly due to his influence, I 
think, that the Marxian discourse about homosexuality has changed.  He 
does not deserve to be spat on.


Comradely,
Tavis

[PEN-L:9000] Re: Foucault & Hayek

[Tavis Barr]

On Tue, 18 Mar 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

> a Foucaultian on the Spoons
> Foucault list said:
> 
> > The most important effect of
> >(neo-)liberalism for Foucault was the link it offers between the
> >subject and the state, the private and the public, it constitues at
> >the same time the ground for the state and an implicit critique for
> >its actions. In short, he wanted to show the power effects of this
> >very particular kind of freedom, which exposes itself as natural.
> 
> Anyone here know anything about all this?

I think the point is fairly simple.  It comes from Foucault's conception 
that "power is everywhere."  The liberal statist conception placed power 
in a few spheres: The power to publish articles, the power to vote, etc.  
Foucault's point was that power is reflected in all spheres of life (the 
way we talk, the way we fuck) and that the liberal discourse uses its 
claims of "neutrality" to narrowly define power and then play with power 
in the spheres that it explicitly refuses to acknowledge (e.g., household 
relations, sexuality) and at the same time ban those spheres from 
discussions of power relations.

Foucault would say that the response to this discourse is "resistance," 
which first involves finding the contradictions in the discourse and then 
exposing them.  Although he wrote next to nothing about agency, my 
reading is that he saw this as an ongoing and permanent process without 
any ideal state that could be created.  I don't think that necessarily makes 
him anti-statist, it just means that he would refuse to admit any kind 
of "naturalness" or "neutrality" to the state, or the idea (which is 
contained in liberalism) that a certain correct set of guidelines can 
make a state power-neutral.

I think Foucault is roughly right about this, even if his description is 
farily incomplete.  One could, for example, add a materialist analysis and 
begin to discuss all of the ways that class power shows up in 
non-discursive spheres.  Foucault, however, doesn't do this, and there is 
even some indication in his first volume of The History of Sexuality that 
he sees his analysis in opposition to materialism.

I've never read Miller's biography, only Halperin's meta-biography of 
it.  Halperin does make a good case that it is, indeed, trashy.  Of 
course I've had bad experiences critiquing books I've never read.


Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:8929] Re: Kevin Murphy

[Tavis Barr]

"Chicago labor economist" is probably most of what you need to know.  He 
spends a lot of time trying to argue that industry wage differentials are 
due to unobservable differences in the workers in those industries, and 
other empirical work to support "competitive" hypotheses about the labor 
market.  He is a first-rate statistician but seemas to have known 
everything he wanted to about the economy before actually going out and 
studying it.  His most famous papers are with Larry Katz (QJE Feb 92), 
where they argue that the right speedups and slowdowns and wiggles long 
haloos of supply and demand factors can explain changes in the return to 
education in the 70s and 80s, and with Chinhui Juhn and Brooks Pierce 
(never actually published) where they do something similar for this 
never-explained concept called "unobserved skill," and with Robert Topel 
(in Lang and Leonard, Unemployment and the Structure of Earnings) where 
they use compensating differentials theories to justify the industry wage 
structure.  Etc. Etc.  This is probably more than you wanted to know, 
Jim.  I know nothing about what might have happened between him and any 
ex-wives and I don't care.


Cheers,
Tavis


On Fri, 14 Mar 1997, James Devine wrote:

> does anyone in pen-l land know anything about the work of Kevin Murphy of
> the University of Chicago, who just won the John Bates Clark award?

[PEN-L:8146] Re: SS Reform

[Tavis Barr]

On Thu, 9 Jan 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Nothing that fancy. These numbers come from the flow of funds accounts,
> produced by the reeking servants of the rentier class at the Federal
> Reserve. They do a sources and uses of funds accounting for all the
> principal sectors. In the case of nonfincial corporate business, sources
> include profits, depreciation allowances, credit market borrowing, trade
> credit, equity offerings, etc. Uses include plant & equipment spending,
> inventories, acquisition of financial assets, etc. The -11% figure is the
> figure for net new equity offerings (negative because retirements exceeded
> new offerings) divided by capital expenditures. This is a very standard
> (i.e. vulgar empiricist) use of flow of funds numbers.

So all it says is that firms are investing in capital while retiring 
equity.  This doesn't necessarily contradict the idea that if there were 
a surge in the demand for stocks, it would make its way (evcentually) 
into actual capital expenditures.

> The venture capital industry is quite small relative to the stock market,
> and IPOs very small relative to total investment. (In 1995, venture pools
> totaled $34 billion, down a bit from 1990's $36 billion, and dwarfed by the
> stock market's $8.4 trillion capitalization at the end of 1995. Inflows of
> $4.4 billion exceeded new commitments of $3.9 billion - well under 1% of
> that year's nonresidential investment, suggesting no lack of funds.)
> Obviously they're important at crucial stages for specific companies, but
> they don't count much in the big picture. So even if every dime of the
> IPO-venture capital circuit went into new investment (minus the usual
> deductions for Ferraris and Beluga, of course), it wouldn't have that much
> of an effect on overall K formation.

But I'm just talking about regular old companies.  Suppose they all of a 
sudden find that people are beating down their door to buy $2 trillion of 
their stock.  Assumedly, these are mostly blue-chip companies, since most 
of th eSS funds would probably be managed by money market manager types 
who know pretty whell what they're doing.  What do you think the 
companies will do?


Curious,
Tavis

[PEN-L:8137] Re: SS Reform

[Tavis Barr]

On Wed, 8 Jan 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

> I don't think there's ever been a serious bear market without a serious
> uptick in interest rates. So weak retail sales figures aren't likely to
> bring about a collapse, since speculators will assume a neutral-to-looser
> stance from the Fed. What could bring about a collapse is (some combination
> of) a strengthening economy, rising prices, rising wages, a weaker dollar,
> trouble in the bond market, etc. - all of which would lead to a Fed
> tightening.

So basically you're saying that if there are signs of economic 
contraction, the market will just go higher?  That wasn't my impression 
of what caused, for example, the crash in '87.  I thought it came on the 
heels of a bad 3Q report, just like the small adjustment last fall.

> The numbers are very tiny. Between 1901 and 1996, U.S. nonfinancial firms
> financed only 4% of their capital expenditures using equity. Since 1980,
> because of buybacks and takeovers, the number is -11% (yes, that's a
> negative sign). Most new stock offerings these days are used to cash out
> the original investors, not raise money for expansion.
> 
> So the only overaccumulation that putting SS funds into the stock market is
> of equity holdings, not real capital.

First, I just want to understand your calculation.  You did something like 
run a regression of changes on capital formation on changes in equity, 
and then divide by averages?   So what this really says is that firms 
that increased their capital expenditures by $1 on average increased 
their equity by $.11 and vice versa?  I'm not sure how to interpret the -11% 
until I understand what it stands for.

So then let me see if I understand your argument: Hoi Poloi buys stocks => 
companies get new equity => they cash out their original investors (how?) 
=> the cashed-out investors invest somewhere wiser while the company 
loses value.

Is that roughly right?

In other words, there's a good analogy to banking here.   Capital 
expenditures are like required reserves; equity is like credit.  New 
equity gets bought up by actual money (itself something like cash 
savings), and the equity then goes into other people's stocks and actual 
capital expenditures.  If the formula works like I mentioned above in my 
previous post, where there's an infinite/circular chain of investors, 
each of whom invests portion p in capital and (1-p) in other people's 
stocks, then a dollar of new equity (new in the sense of bought form 
money that was previously outside the stock market) will create a dollar in 
new expenditures but 1/p dollars in new equity.  So as long as no one 
takes a run on the market, like a bank, the equity values can keep going 
up as long as, on a historical average, p*(total equity) = (total profits).
So equity goes up either when profits go up or p goes down.

What's happened, then, is that the system has gone a bit awry because p 
has gone negative and somehow the capital expenditures (read hard 
reserves) are disappearing.  But if the cashed-out folks aren't investing 
in the market, where are they going?  And if they are going back into the 
market, then why don't they eventually lead to captial formation?

I feel like I'm asking some stupid questions, but at least I know that 
you can get a PhD in econ without learning any of this stuff so I'm sure 
I'm not the only one on the list.


Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:8119] SS Reform

[Tavis Barr]

Doug --

I don't discount your point that when the common folk come into the stock 
market, it's time to get out.  That's common wisdom at the business 
school here too.  I'm sure that there will be some transfer 
from poor to rich when the market dives (my own pet theory: At the end of 
this quarter; there was a slowdown in 3Q96 which was offset by a 4Q96 
uptick when the first real wage increase in a long time sent people on a 
holiday shopping spree, but once the 1Q97 sales reports come in, 
investors will freak), just as there usually is, but just because the rich 
come out winners doesn't mean they're better off than they would be 
without a market crash.  On average they hold different stocks, but in 
the spread, they hold the same stocks as everyone else.

I guess I just disagree about the extent to which this will affect the 
economy.  It's true I have little background in finance.  You say that 
very little of stock investment goes into actual capital, most of it goes 
into other stocks, and I'm curious about that.  Does it basically mean 
that there's a big circular bubble, so that if enough companies crash, 
they all crash?  What percentage is it?  If enough companies' stocks are 
held by "stupid" people, won't this potential flood of investors only 
exacerbate the problem?

Perhaps more to the point: Even though most stocks will be invested in 
other people's stocks, it will still be true (if things work the way I 
think you're saying they do) that every dollar inflow will be a dollar 
that goes into new capital investment.  For example, I invest a dollar in 
company A's new stock outlay.  $1/3 goes to capital expenditures, and 
$2/3 goes to company B's stock.  Of that $2/3, $2/9 goes to capital 
expenditures, and $4/9 goes to Company C's stock.  Etc.  In other words 
$ p * SUM([1-p]^n) = $1 for any p between 0 and 1 goes into new capital 
investment.

So there's a trillion dollars of new capital investment.  Well, since all 
of the most profitable investments have been made, they go to less 
profitable investments and drive down the rate of profit.

This hardly seems consistent with past government behavior, which has 
been to prop up the rate of profit (or at least long-term rates of 
return) as much as possible.  So why the change?  Is it just that the 
Republicans are being short-sighted? Will the government eventually 
realize what's going to happen and abandon it?  Or has there been a 
change in outlook on someone's part?  If so, whose, and why?


Curious for more thoughts,
Tavis

[PEN-L:8114] Re: SS Reform

[Tavis Barr]

On Tue, 7 Jan 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Think of it this way: getting the government to buy stocks from rich folks
> - what tech analysts on Wall Street call "distribution," the transfer of
> stocks from smart to dumb, rich to poor, or whatever unfavorable binary you
> want to use - would be a great use of public money, no?

But they're not buying from the rich.  They're buying from firms, which 
are owned by the rich, and they're becoming co-owners.  Investment 
bankers will now have trillions in new funds to play around with, 
investing them in marginal companies and screwing everyone else over, 
including the rest of the bourgeoisie.  The only thing I can figure out is 
that the people on Wall Street aren't Marxists so they don't see it this 
way.  But somehow I don't think you have to be a Marxist to see the 
potential effect on stock prices.  It may be good for JP Morgan, but it 
sure as hell won't be good for any of their clients or stockholders.  So 
aside from the traders themselves, who would want such a thing?

> But as they also say on Wall Street, a bear market is when money returns to
> its rightful owners (like the Rockefellers).

Could you elaborate on this, Doug?  As far as I know, a bear market is 
when money returns to those who are either lucky enough to have predicted 
it or cautious or rich enough to have diversified their portfolios and 
everyone else (including some Rockerfellers) gets royally fucked.  Either 
way, a bear market of this proportion strikes me as the "massive 
destruction of capital values" or whatever it was that Marx called a 
depression that many claim the government has been doing its damnedest 
to stave off for twenty-five years.  Why the sudden change of heart?  Is 
there a new ruling-class consensus or faction that wants this to happen, 
like those German industrialists who supported Hitler's autarky program?  I 
just really don't get it.


   Becoming more of a dogmatic essentialist 
   through the course of the discussion,
   Tavis

[PEN-L:8110] SS Reform

[Tavis Barr]

Recent contributors to Pen-L have raised many of the relevant and concrete 
questions about Social Security reform in terms of who it will affect 
and how.  But since this is a list full of long-wave theorists, I'm 
wondering if I can also bring up some abstract and irrelevant ideas.

Specifically, throwing a trillion dollars into the stock market seems 
like a strange thing to do at this point.  Although the private business 
economy showed growth last year, in general, say, over the past five 
years (or twenty-five for that matter but let's say five for now since 
this may be a cyclical question as much as a long-wave one), it has 
suffered very little dynamism (e.g., low productivity 
growth, low profitability by historical standards), which suggests to me 
that it suffers from overaccumulation.  If these trillion dollars are 
thrown into stocks which then go into new capital spending, won't it 
exacerbate the problem?  If, alternatively, they are thrown into bonds 
and speculation, won't it further increase the instability already 
created by so much debt and speculative bubble-blowing?  In general, 
government policy over the course of this downswing has been to bolster 
returns on capital assets, either by creating new low-interest loanable 
funds in the 70s that allowed firms to reap profits on low-return 
outlays, or bonds in the 1980s (from deficit spending) that created a 
return-bearing alternative to the stock market.  Doesn't this move have 
exactly the opposite effect?  Or am I missing something?


Curious,
Tavis

[PEN-L:7799] Re: Larry Summers

[Tavis Barr]

As I remember, it was an internal World Bank memo a little over four 
years ago from Summers who was then head cheese to the then vice-head 
cheese (can't remember who that was) that got leaked to the press.
Summers was not joking.  The argument is very simple: People in poorer 
countries are poorer therefore you have to pay them less hten people in 
rich countries to accept bad things therefore they will be better off 
taking a burden at a given compensation.  It can be show rigorously 
using utility theory without too much difficulty (poorer people have 
lower marginal disutilities in monetary terms).  Summers didn't even 
bother talking about compensating people (I s'pose the argument holds in 
the limit as the amount of compensation goes to zero).  I'd look in The 
Nation in the summer of 92 or so.

The scary thing is, he's actually more progressive than a lot of 
mainstream economists.


A la peant butter sandwiches,
Tavis


On Mon, 9 Dec 1996, Robert Cherry wrote:

>   I recall that Summers argued that it would be efficient if we exported 
> pollution-producing production overseas.  Does anyone have a reference and 
> the specifics of his argument.  It came up at Brooklyn College and a 
> colleague told people that he said it in jest which I am sure is not true.
> 
> Robert Cherry
> Brooklyn College
> EMail:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 

[PEN-L:7752] Re: Cost of Job Loss

[Tavis Barr]

On Thu, 5 Dec 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> Stop me before I regress again! I'll leave further work to those 
> with more sophisticated 'metrics. (bill?)


Just two comments (I'd do this myself but I erased the data):

(1) You should let the data tell you where the structural break 
is.  Assume linearity of the trend on both ends and normality of the 
error structure (of course you could do it semi-parametrically but there 
aren't enough observations to get anything meaningful) and then do one 
regression taking the break in each year.  Choose the year with the 
highest likelihood value.

(2) You should really do this in first differences (or else calculate a 
cointegrating vector) since both of these are likely to be I(1) processes.


Geekishly yours,
Tavis

[PEN-L:7685] Who did JR shoot?

[Tavis Barr]

Max, I didn't mean to contradict you, just to add a slightly odd 
qualification.  I don't think that either of these things counts as 
substantial political work.  But Rifkin is certainly regarded as highly 
influential by some people who count.  This might mean he has personal 
relationships with high-up bureaucrats or something.  It would be 
interesting to know how he stays there, e.g., who this big office spends 
all its time courting.  I take it from your Washington insider 
knowledge they must be very selective of who they spend their time on.  
There is no end of weird groups out there with small following but lots 
of money and lots of influence and they might make for a good course in 
anatomy. 

Cheers,
Tavis


On Mon, 2 Dec 1996, Max B. Sawicky wrote:

> by all means, let's give JR the benefit of the doubt,
> insofar as evidence warrants.  The day after I wrote
> that I had never seen him involved in anything, I caught
> him on C-SPAN speaking before a conference of the
> National League of Cities (it was late and I didn't listen
> to the speech, and besides "Vampire Vixens from Venus"
> was on at the same time).  He got an incredible intro
> duction from the NLC hostess, including the revelation
> that he was chosen by National Journal as one of 150
> most influential persons affecting national policy.  Pretty
> hard to believe, I have to say, but there you are.

[PEN-L:7669] Re: The Long Term

[Tavis Barr]

On Fri, 29 Nov 1996, Max B. Sawicky wrote:
> The sphere to
> which I allude is not only the Beltway scene, much beloved
> by followers of this list, but also the hinterlands.  Has
> anyone been aware of JR involved in any politics -- even
> political statements -- other than book-tour stuff?  If
> I'm wrong I would appreciate being corrected.

Max, I have this weird story, I'm not sure if it's worth much or not.  In 
the fall of 1990, I was a freshman in college and fighting like a chicken 
with its head cut off (or at least one that hadn't grown a head yet, if 
it even now has) against the impending war with Iraq.  There were several 
initial attempts by students at different schools who knew each other to 
start up national coalitions.  Of course we were all very territorial as 
17-year-olds are.  But one "coalition" was odder than the rest.  It faxed, 
mailed, and e-mailed every known student group against the war, calling 
them to a conference.  It claimed to be _the_ group pulling together all 
students fighting the Gulf War and said everyone must show up at this 
conference.  Kind of like Workers' World with reformist politics.  But 
after enough faxes you tend to believe this stuff, except that none of 
us students in different groups had heard of these people.  Well, I later 
found out, it was a group of newly-arrived DC area student activists whom 
a certain JR ad given seed money and promised $35,000 if they could get a 
thousand people to this conference.  Only he wanted his name 
kept secret (incidentally, the conference never happened, though some of 
the same people worked on a more real conference that did happen and I 
got to know and like them).  So who knows, he may be funding more 
political organizations than we know :|

Footnotingly yours,
Tavis

[PEN-L:7588] Re: Cookies

[Tavis Barr]

Peter, I think you'll find that the recipe was on the back of a cereal 
box, I can't remember which one (or maybe it was Hershey's cocoa?).  It's 
been running around on the net for three or four years.  I've used it, 
though, and it's a good recipe.  Try it out.

Cheers,
Tavis



On Tue, 26 Nov 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> 
> > Subject:   $250 Cookie Recipe
> >  
> > This is a true story.  Pass it on!!! 
> >  
> > My daughter & I had just finished a salad at Neiman-Marcus Cafe in Dallas 
> > & decided to have a small dessert. Because both of us are  such cookie 
> > lovers, we decided to try the "Neiman-Marcus Cookie". It was so excellent 
> > that I asked if they would give me the recipe and the waitress said with 
> > a small frown, "I'm afraid not." Well, I said, would you let me buy the 
> > recipe? With a cute smile, she said, "Yes." I asked how much, and she  
> > responded, "Only two fifty, it's a great deal!" I said with approval, 
> > just add it to my tab.
> > Thirty days later, I received my VISA statement from Neiman-Marcus and it 
> > was $285.00. I looked again and I remembered I had only spent $9.95 for 
> > two salads and about $20.00 for a scarf. As I glanced at the bottom of the 
> > statement, it said, "Cookie Recipe - $250.00." That's outrageous!!  
> > I called Neiman's Accounting Dept. and told them the waitress said it  
> > was "two-fifty," which clearly does not mean "two hundred and fifty dollars" 
> > by any *POSSIBLE* interpretation of the phrase. Nieman-Marcus refused to
> > budge. They would not refund my money, because according to them, "What the 
> > waitress told you is not our problem. You have already seen the recipe - we 
> > absolutely will not refund your money at this point." I explained to her the 
> > criminal statutes which govern fraud in Texas, I threatened to refer them 
> > to the Better Business Bureau and the State's Attorney General for 
> > engaging in fraud. I was basically told, "Do what you want, we don't give 
> > a crap, and we're not refunding your money." I waited, thinking of how I 
> > could get even, or even try and get any of my money back. I just said, 
> > "Okay,you folks got my $250, and now I'm going to have $250.00 worth of 
> > fun." I told her that I was going to see to it that every cookie lover in 
> > the United States with an e-mail account has a $250.00 cookie recipe from 
> > Neiman-Marcus... for free. She replied, "I wish you wouldn't do this." I 
> > said, "Well, you should have thought of that before you ripped me off,and 
> > slammed down the phone on her.
> > So, here it is!!! Please, please, please pass it on to everyone you 
> > can possibly think of. I paid $250 dollars for this... I don't want 
> > Nieman-Marcus to *ever* get another penny off of this recipe
> >  
> >  
> > $250 DOLLAR COOKIE RECIPE:
> > 2 cups butter
> > 4 cups flour
> > 2 tsp. soda
> > 2 cups sugar
> > 5 cups blended oatmeal **
> > 24 oz. chocolate chips
> > 2 cups brown sugar
> > 1 tsp. salt
> > 1 8 oz. Hershey Bar (grated)
> > 4 eggs
> > 2 tsp. baking powder
> > 3 cups chopped nuts (your choice) 
> > 2 tsp. vanilla
> >  
> > ** Measure oatmeal and blend in a blender to a fine powder. Cream
> > the butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla; mix together with 
> > flour,oatmeal, salt, baking powder, and soda. Add chocolate chips, Hershey 
> > Bar and nuts. Roll into balls and place two inches apart on a cookie 
> > sheet. Bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Makes 112 cookies. 
> >  
> > 
> > 
> 

[PEN-L:7585] Re: Zaire, US and French imprialism

[Tavis Barr]

I think this is a very narrow interpretation of what's going on.  I've 
worked here in New York with people currently fighting in Kabila's army 
and they're hardly dupes of US imperialism.  Nor, for that matter, are 
they Tutsi.  They have been active participants in anti-imperialist 
movements here (this is how I know them), most notably around Haiti.

Kabila is a bona fide leftist and anti-imperialist, albeit a bit of an 
ecclectic one whose vision is not always clear.  His army has been trying to 
overthrow Mobutu for thirty years now, and has often come in direct 
conflict with US-trained Zairian troops.  The current offensive was made 
precisely to prevent a US intervention in the region.

Yes, both the US and the rebels would like to see Mobutu weakened.  
Ironically, Kabila is sort of doing to Mobutu what the US did to Lumumba 
in the 60s: Supress government revenues by breaking off control of mining 
regions in the east (though in this case it's Kivu instead of Katanga).  
It's quite possible that the US can use this to their advantage, since 
they'd never let a bunch of lefty nationalists control Kinshasa (I can 
see the NYT headlines now: Tutsi rebels cause mayhem, US to invade to 
save Zaire from tribalist nightmare) but are happy to see them generate 
instability.  But these guerillas will be much better for Kivu (not to 
mention the Rwandan refugees) than the national government.  And for 
now, the fact that the US doesn't want to invade is kind of a relief.

In strudel,
Tavis




On Tue, 26 Nov 1996, Karl Carlile wrote:

> A KARL CARLILE MESSAGE
> 
> KARL: The Great Lakes Region crisis is essentially a
> product of inter-imperialist rivalry between Washington
> and Paris over the resources of Africa.
> 
> The Hutu peoples are backed by French imperialism while
> the Tutsi people, as represented by the Rwandan
> government and the Eastern Zaire Tutsi rebels, are
> backed by American imperialism.

[PEN-L:7115] re: A Pomo (re)quest

[Tavis Barr]

The point is not about intellectual laziness.  It's about communication.  
If we have to go back to an original work to discuss the ideas contained 
in it, then its concrete relevance is not clear.  Example: Many (most?) 
of us have read at least most of the three volumes of Capital.  Yet we 
have discussions about Marx's ideas (e.g., FROP, the Transformation 
Problem) without ever referring to the originals.  Some of the 
discussions have been long and others, while productive and interesting 
even to specialists, have been soundbite-length.  Some of them have even 
come from people who have never read Das K questioning people who have.

As one of those occasional discussants, I have enough confidence in the 
continued relevance of Marx's ideas to state what they are and why they 
are important without telling someone, "They're too complicated for 
soundbites.  Go read Capital."  Fortunately, Stephen Cullenberg seems to 
have a similar confidence that what he got out of _Spectres of Marx_ was 
relevant.  I hope it produces some interesting discussion.  But If all 
that lefty academics can do when our social relevance challenged is to 
refer people to texts, then we're in trouble.


Yours for the discourse,
Tavis



On Fri, 1 Nov 1996, Gerald Levy wrote:

> If you think I'm going to summarize Derrida or _Capital_ in 15, 30, or 90
> seconds, you've got another thing coming.
> 
> My point is that one can *not* legitimately summarize a complex body of
> ideas into a short soundbite.
> 
> It is the attempt at simplification that, in part, separated Ricardo from
> the "vulgar economists" and Marx from the "vulgar Marxists."
> 
> If one wants short fairy-tale like answers to complex theoretical and
> political questions, then perhaps one should revert to reading "Quotations
> from Chairman Mao" and, thereby, substitute vacuous slogans and prose for
> analysis.

[PEN-L:7101] re: A Pomo (re)quest

[Tavis Barr]

Jerry, I had the exact same reaction Doug did.  Of course you can't 
summarize _Capital_ in thirty seconds but you can bring out its main points 
and say what its chief contribution is.  Enough anyway, to demonstrate 
that it makes an important contribution.  So, how about it: _Spectres of 
Marx_ in thirty seconds?  Or fifteen or ninety if you like.

Cheers,
Tavis


On Fri, 1 Nov 1996, Doug Henwood wrote:

> At 7:55 PM 10/31/96, Gerald Levy wrote:
> 
> >Oh, yeah: why don't you ask him to summarize _Capital_ for a 30 second
> >soundbite for "Nightline"?
> 
> How about:
> 
> "Beginning with an analysis of that strange but unexamined thing, the
> commodity, Marx examines the human social relations behind its creation and
> sale, uncovering exploitation and violence behind the facade of peaceful
> exchange. He then broadens his inquiry to cover the system as a whole,
> first by examining what today is called the "real" economy - investment,
> growth, the relations between economic sectors - and then turning to a
> prescient analysis of the seemingly unreal worlds of money and credit."
> 
> Took me 24 seconds in my radio mode.
> 
> Doug
> 
> --
> 
> Doug Henwood
> Left Business Observer
> 250 W 85 St
> New York NY 10024-3217
> USA
> +1-212-874-4020 voice
> +1-212-874-3137 fax
> email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> web: 
> 
> 
> 

[PEN-L:7002] Re: Politics of free time (reply to Max Sawicky)

[Tavis Barr]

Labor Notes also has a  new pamphlet out on this.  I think it's called 
_Our Time_.  I leafed through it and it looked pretty good.  Their 
address is [EMAIL PROTECTED]


Cheers,
Tavis


On Tue, 29 Oct 1996, Tom Walker wrote:

> By all means explore my web site more, I'd also recommend the following for
> more comprehensive theoretical and historical discussion:
> 
> - Andre Gorz, _Critique of Economic Reason_, Verso, 1989.
> 
> - David Roediger and Philip Foner, _Our Own Time: A History of American
> Labor and the Working Day_, Greenwood Press, 1989.
> 
> - Benjamin Hunnicutt, _Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the
> Right to Work_, Temple University Press, 1988.
> 
> Roediger and Foner argue "The length of the workdays... has historically
> been the central issue raised by the American labor movement during its most
> dynamic periods of organization".
> 
> 'Thirty for forty' is a slogan, not a politics. As for 'economic doubts', I
> can't agree that political controversies -- even when posed as economic
> issues -- are typically resolved by feasibility studies or cost/benefit
> analyses. Again, I'll return to my argument that perhaps the long losing
> streak of the left stems from its virtual abandonment of the working time issue.
> 
> May I add a footnote that could open a whole can of worms: In volume one of
> Capital, Marx, distinguishes between the extraction of absolute surplus
> value, achieved by the lengthening of the working day and relative surplus
> value, achieved by lowering the costs of reproducing labour power. These two
> methods of extracting surplus value correspond to two historically
> distinctive stages in the organization of the labour process, which Marx
> labels "Manufacture" and "Modern Industry" (or, in a previously unpublished
> chapter, included as an appendix to the Vintage translation: the Formal and
> Real Subsumption of Labour to Capital).
> 
> To make a very long story short: I would argue that current changes in the
> organization of the labour process (flexible manufacture, contingent
> workforces, etc.) strive toward a unique combination of absolute and
> relative surplus value. So the length of the working day is not simply an
> important issue, it is the central issue for a progressive politics.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Tom Walker, [EMAIL PROTECTED], (604) 669-3286
> The TimeWork Web: http://mindlink.net/knowware/worksite.htm
> 
> 

[PEN-L:6975] Re: exploitation in progressive organizations? (was re:aiusa)

[Tavis Barr]

Some further comments on Maggie's views (sorry I deleted the original by 
mistake):

There tend to be two sort of "equilibria" for working conditions in 
progressive organizations.  I'm sure that game theorists could come up 
with the appropriate complementarities, etc, to ogenerate them:

1.  Low-paid, high-turnover organizations (e.g., ACORN) that get lots of 
middle-class kids straight out of college and work them hard for as long 
as they can stand it: A few weeks, a few months, a few years;

2.  Medium-pay, low-turnover organizations whose staffers are careerists: 
Many international unions (e.g., SEIU, UAW) and workers' centers.

In the case of many of the "Type 1" organizations, the staffers aren't 
expecting much.  They believe in what they are doing and are happy to 
forsake a good chunk of their wages, etc., for a good cause.  In the case 
of "Type 2," though, the organizers are expecting a sustainable working 
life.  For example, the SEIU international has its own staff union, 
through which its workers try, among other things, to gain control over 
how they do their work.  If Amnesty was in the "Type 1," then it's 
possible that many of its staffers didn't want to unionize because they 
didn't see themselves there for the long haul.  However, I believe that 
there are advantages to being a progressive organization where the 
workers have control.  Among them:

a.  A serious relationship with the community you are organizing.  In New 
York, ACORN hires people who work for one week to a month before they 
quit to go out and get petitions in low-income communities around social 
justice issues.  Usually these are white, middle-class college students 
or recent graduates doing work in communities of color.  Not that they  
shouldn't, but the low pay and poor working conditions of these jobs is a 
key reason, I think, why ACORN rarely hires people from these communities.
They would be much better off sending their staffers to work through 
existing community organizations.

b.  Developing experience among the staff about how to organize.  
Short-term staff miss out on a lot of lessons and often don't know what 
they're missing out on.  Good canvassers can come to conclude that 
canvassing is the right way to do things.  People who disagree leave.  
Ditto for union organizers who work on blitz campaigns to sign up workers 
at given workplaces.

c.  Developing the discourse of power among the staff.  It should be an 
important progressive goal to get people to think that they ought to have 
a say in how they work.  This is true regardless how much they are 
sacrificing for their cause: Progressive organizations should be 
democratic, and part of this is their staff time being democratically 
allocated.  Of course the overall decisions about the allocation should 
be made by members of the organization and not by the staff (this doesn't 
happen enough), but the default is that everything gets decided by 
top-level staffers and this is not a way that people can learn to think 
about how work and life could be structured in a more democratic society.

I Hope I'm not just stating the obvious here.  I have seen many 
organizations change dramatically from the creation of a staff union and 
many stagnate because of head staff who refuse to give up power.


Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:6856] Re: puzzle

[Tavis Barr]

Do stupid neoclassical models count?  If so, then it's easy.  Suppose 
that there is a one-good economy with capital-enhancing, labor-diminishing 
technological change, that starts in period 100, such that 

(1) y = t * K^(1-1/t^2) * L^(1/t^2) 

where t is the period.  The Wlarasian auctioneer declares that 

(2) w = MPL = 1/t * (K/L)^(1-1/t^2)
(3) r = MPK = (t - 1/t) * (K/L)^(-1/t^2)

The economy starts out with an capital stock of one unit per worker; 
income is evenly distributed, and population is normalized to one.

The utility function creates a savings rule such that, letting k = K/L,

(4) k_(t+1)= { (t - 1/t)/([t+1] - [1/(t+1)]) k_t } ^{[(t+1)/t]^2}

This basically means that the capital stock grows secularly, but 
accumulation asymptotes to zero.  So some (messy) standard NC utility 
function will work.

Notice that (4) plugged into (3) implies a constant profit rate; (2) 
implies that wages asymptote to zero; and (1) implies that output is 
secularly increasing arithmetically.

How'd I do?

Cheers,
Tavis


On Tue, 22 Oct 1996, Michael Perelman wrote:

> Doug had prodded me into discussing my theory of competition.  Let me
> propose a puzzle to test it.  Suppose you are given an exam which asked
> you to explain, using neo-classical categories, how market economies
> throughout the world could experience at the same time
> 1) rapid technological increase
> 2) falling wages
> 3) relatively stable profits
> Cobb Douglas functions are optimal.
> 
> Note: while wealth of the rich has increased, this increase is
> insufficient to explain any of the above. 
>  -- 
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
> 
> Tel. 916-898-5321
> E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 

[PEN-L:6742] Re: Competitiveness

[Tavis Barr]

On Thu, 17 Oct 1996, Doug Henwood wrote:

> My O is rarely H. Mergers can be a response to profitability pressures, no?
> The health care merger wave in the U.S. now is a response to
> cost-containment pressures, for example. Ditto weapons industry mergers, a
> response to shrinking procurement budgets (relative to GDP, not in absolute
> terms).

Or, the need to invest accumulated assets could cause companies to invest 
in LS-CU technologies with larger returns to scale and lower marginal 
costs, as well as lower profits, which in turn causes them to compete 
with companies further away (either geographically or in terms of 
substitutability) and thus increase "competitiveness" at the same time as 
they increase concentration.  This is consistent with "monopolistic" 
features such as a rising profit margin even with falling profit rates.  
I don't have any evidence to suggest that it's the case, just that it's 
possible.

> Here are the latest household credit numbers - outstanding levels expressed
> as a percentage of disposable personal income, from the Fed's flow of funds
> stats. 1996 figures are averages of the first two quarters; all others are
> averages of the four quarters. Not shown in detail are miscellaneous forms
> of credit like bank loans, security credit, and trade credit; they are,
> however, included in the total. Because interest rates are lower now than
> in the late 1980s, the debt service burden is lower than then, even as the
> debt stock has continued to rise (and personal bankruptcies are at record
> levels).

So do you have any idea what a default level is?  International banks 
seem to regard anything above a 100% debt/GNP ratio as risky; is it 
similar for consumers?  Are defaults up?  Are the indicators of defaults 
well known?  Are they worth an academic study?


Curious,
Tavis


> HOUSEHOLD CREDIT, PERCENT OF DISPOSABLE PERSONAL INCOME
> 
>  homeconsumer
> total  mortgages  credit
> 195235.5%21.5%11.4%
.
.
> 199693.1%62.6%20.6%
> 
> 
> Doug
> 
> --
> 
> Doug Henwood
> Left Business Observer
> 250 W 85 St
> New York NY 10024-3217
> USA
> +1-212-874-4020 voice
> +1-212-874-3137 fax
> email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> web: 
> 
> 
> 

[PEN-L:6724] Re: Competitiveness

[Tavis Barr]

Do we have the usual up-to-the-minute Doug Henwood stats on credit card 
debt?  If so, what's happened?  

Curious,
Tavis

P.S.  My other question, for both Doug and Mike, is about concentration, 
since that's how the thread started.  Please note, I'm not a Monopoly 
Capital adherent, this is really just a question about logic: Is there 
any contradiction, IYHOs, between lower profitability and increased 
concentration?  Or increased differentiation?

On Wed, 16 Oct 1996, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Though I think there are a lot of similarities between the present and the
> late 19th century, one difference is that increased competitive and
> deflationary pressures have not yet shown up in depressed profitability. I
> wonder if the reason for this is that so far capital has successfully
> shifted all the burden of adjustment onto labor: in the 19th century there
> was nothing for labor to "give back," but after the Golden Age there was
> plenty to be taken from workers. Additionally, the deflationary consquences
> of the attack on labor have been avoided through consumer credit, which has
> sustained aggregate demand despite pressure on income. The question then is
> how long can this be sustained, before there is no more to take back from
> labor, and there is no room left on the VISA card?

[PEN-L:6704] Re: Competitiveness

[Tavis Barr]

On Mon, 14 Oct 1996, Michael Perelman wrote:

> I do not have a precise definition of competitiveness.  I do have an
> understanding about what it means.  Most industries have low marginal
> and high fixed costs.  Under competitive conditions, they would lose
> money.  Profits, in effect, are a sign of weak competition.
> 
> Is that the sort of answer that you wanted?

I guess so.  It just begs a lot of questions.  Essentially it defines 
low-profit periods as high-competition periods and vice versa.  Okay, 
but what has created this competition?  Is it because capitals are 
finding that new markets don't exist so they go after existing ones?  Is 
it, conversely, because firms are expanding their horizons to different 
countries?  Is it because accumulation, and the need to invest 
accumulated assets, has made new firms willing to enter at a lower profit 
rate?  And, given any of these explanations, what is one to make of the 
current profit boom?  And is any of these hypotheses in contradiction to 
a pattern of increasing concentration?  Enquiring minds wanna know.


May the last bureaucrat be hung by the entrails of the last capitalist,
Tavis

[PEN-L:6678] Re: Competitiveness

[Tavis Barr]

Michael, what, for you, defines competitiveness?  Is it a high elasticity 
of own-firm demand?  Is it simply a low profit rate that causes others to 
enter into one's sector at the sign of even moderate profits?  If so, 
what are the causes of low profits, IYHO?  Does competitiveness mean a 
lack of rents, or jsut profits?  How about markups?  These are not 
rhetorical questions, I'm trying to figure out where you're coming from.

Thanks,
Tavis


On Fri, 11 Oct 1996, Michael Perelman wrote:

> We are taught that competition is good.  Yet, we can think of a
> depression as a symptom of heightened competition.
> 
> Within this framework, what happens during a depression is what happens
> with greater competition.  Business gets busy laying off workers,
> installing new technology [yes, the depression was a period of rapid
> technical change], and finding ways to rebuild their profits.
> 
> In terms of income shares, profits fall more than wages -- as we would
> expect with more competition.  But the fall in workers' standard of
> living is a greater threat to their being [notwithstanding our imagery
> of flying bankers following the stock market crash].
> 
> The government tries to avoid excess competiition [depressions] via
> government spending (i.e. military expenditures) and a lenient policy
> toward anti-competitive measures.  Business will tend to organize and
> consolidate until they can enjoy a new period of lax competition.
> 
> --
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
> 
> Tel. 916-898-5321
> E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 

[PEN-L:6593] Re: Why raise the minimum wage

[Tavis Barr]

On the monopoly/competitive stuff:

I think that a more serious answer is that firm concentration tends to be 
a mediocre predictor of industry profitability, or, for that matter, the 
level of industry rents.  Firms generate rents when there is poor 
substitutability between their products and other firms' products.  There 
might be more substitutability, say, in the cigarette market (eight firms) 
than in the restaurant market (tens of thousands).

The disappearance of rents can have ambiguous effects.  To the extent 
that they are shared, it will lower wages; to the extent that rents raise 
the prices of goods relative to wages, it will raise wages.  Perhaps 
rents have disappeared, but I'm not convinced.  Doug, do you think that 
increased "competitiveness" is responsible for declining standards of living?


Expiring minds wanna know,
Tavis

[PEN-L:6551] Re: why raise the minimum wage

[Tavis Barr]

It's just not obvious.  For the most part there is very little effect of 
the minimum wage on macroeconomic variables.  There is a falling 
wage/output ratio and we still have 3% inflation.  Periods of 
relatively stable wage/output ratios have not historically been periods of 
high inflation.  You may be right about the general direction of the 
impact of wage increases on prices, but mainstream economists gave labor 
the blame for a good chunk of 70s inflation wihtout any empirical 
evidence to back them up.

YFTMW,
Tavis





On Wed, 9 Oct 1996, Robert Cherry wrote:

>While labor productivity is not constant, I continue to think it is 
> avoidance to claim that technological change will COMPLETELY eliminate the
> INITIAL inflationary impact. This is the kind of neoclassical slight of hand 
> that we rightly condemn mainstream economists for when they use it.  
> Moreover, these technological changes are not rapid so that over the next two 
> years we should definitely assume that labor productive changes will be 
> unaffected by the minimum wage rise.
> 
>In addition, Jim claims that the minimum wage increase is an antidote to 
> deflationary tendencies so that he, too, is assuming that the minimum wage 
> rise will keep price higher than they would have been otherwise.  Finally, 
> when the minimum wage was being discussed a fast food's owner 
> who was in favor of the rise indicated that he expected to increase his 
> prices by an average of 1.20 percent; 6 cents on a $5 bill. 
> 
>  Again, instead of giving some longrun neoclassical explanation which will 
> only PARTIALLY offset the increase, we should be honest and defend the modest 
> inflationary increase which will definitely occur in the shortrun.  If we are 
> unwilling to confront the inflationary argument head-on when it is low wage 
> workers gaining increases, how will we respond when it is unionized middle 
> income workers gaining wage increases as the labor market tightens? 
> 
> 
> 

[PEN-L:6543] Re: why raise the minimum wage?

[Tavis Barr]

Sorry y'all.  Jim's right.

Cheers,
Tavis



On Wed, 9 Oct 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> Tavis writes>> I really don't get this. A rise in wages would be 
> inflationary if (1) it caused firms to raise mark-ups over labor 
> costs; (2) it created a rise in prices from a rise in consumer 
> demand.<<
> 
> The second makes sense, but not the first. With _constant_ 
> mark-ups over unit labor costs and constant labor productivity, a 
> rise in the minimum wage would spur price inflation (unless the 
> over-all wage structure compressed, so that the economy-wide 
> average wage stayed constant or fell).
> 
> As Tavis notes, labor productivity isn't constant, so this 
> inflationary scenario doesn't wash. In fact, as others have 
> noted, higher wages may stimulate technological change and more 
> capital-intensive production, so that labor productivity growth 
> would accelerate. This, as Tavis notes, also helps with the 
> demand-side scenario (case 2).
> 
> Going beyond this quibble, I think that a rise in the minimum 
> wage is one small part of the prevention of the looming 
> _deflationary_ tendencies in the US and world economies. It may 
> not be enough, however. 
> 
> The slow but steady worldwide equalization downward of wages and 
> conditions means stagnant consumer demand. If and when investment 
> stops, that could mean depression, especially given the largely 
> deflationary tilt of monetary and fiscal policy around the world.
> 
> A rise in the minimum wage also counteracts the possibilities of 
> actual price falls (a problem that BUSINESS WEEK has noted 
> several times over the years) which can boost the real value of 
> debts, encouraging mass bankruptcies and a Fisher-type 
> debt-deflation depression.  
> 
> Finally, given the abundance of profits (and the booming of 
> profit rates) in recent years, it's easy to imagine that the 
> capitalists can afford to pay slightly higher wages. 
> 
> in pen-l solidarity,
> 
> Jim Devine   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> <74267,[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ.
> 7900 Loyola Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045-8410 USA
> 310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950
> "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way
> and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
> 
> 

[PEN-L:6538] Re: Why raise the minimum wage? (fwd)

[Tavis Barr]

Ajit, this sounds intriguing.  There are empirical papers estimating the 
cross-elasticities of demand for skilled and unskilled labor, and you 
might want to look at them and try to begin to get a sense of whether or 
not the numbers are reasonable for such a story.  But I think it would 
definitely be worth a paper.  It's sad, but Card and Krueger can't really 
explain their results that minimum wages increase employment.

The only cite I have for David Card and Alan Krueger's study is an NBER 
working paper.  I'm sure it's been published since.  Sorry.


Cheers,
Tavis

On Wed, 9 Oct 1996, Ajit Sinha wrote:

> 
> > However, the best empirical 
> >study of the minimum wage, by Card and Krueger, shows that minimum wages 
> >seem to have a positive employment effect.
> 
> >Tavis
> 
> 
> Some years ago I wrote a paper (6 pp. long) for a graduate level labor
> economics course. Since it was a totally neoclassical course, I developed a
> 100% neoclassical model by distinguishing two kinds of labor market:
> unskilled and skilled. I identified the real wages in unskilled market with
> minimum wage and made it the floor for the wage structure in the skilled
> labor market. The skilled labor market was developed in terms of demand for
> skills by the workers on the basis of maximizing the lifelong income;
> whereas the firms side was developed on the basis of demand for skilled
> labor due to its influence on productivity. The model developed two possible
> senario, and in both the cases the result was that a fall in minimum wages
> MAY lead to a fall in the demand for skilled workers, leading to a possible
> fall in total employment if the skilled labor market is large enough.
> 
> My conservative professor was quite impressed. He did not only give me an A
> for this very short paper by any standard, but also asked me to send it for
> publication, which i thought was a silly idea at that time. But now I think,
> may be I should give it a thought. So could you give me the reference of
> Card and Krueger. Their evidence may support my model. Cheers, ajit sinha
> 
> 

[PEN-L:6537] Re: Why raise the minimum wage

[Tavis Barr]

I really don't get this.  A rise in wages would be inflationary if

(1) it caused firms to raise mark-ups over labor costs;

(2) it created a rise in prices from a rise in consumer demand.

Either of these is possible in a static model where wages autonomously 
rise; however, in a dynamic model, technology is also changing.  If labor 
costs lower relative to total costs from a change in technology, then 
increasing them will move prices back toward where they were; similarly, 
if technical change causes more output to be producable for the same 
cost, then the higher consumption demand can be created without an 
increase in prices.

Wages have almost never outpaced technical change in this country.  
Briefly in the late 1960s.  And it was not a highly inflationary period.  
Conversely, the late 1970s were a period of falling real wages.


Cheers,
Tavis


On Wed, 9 Oct 1996, Robert Cherry wrote:

>Everyone seems to be avoiding the possibility that the rise in the minimum 
> wage might be somewhat inflationary.  As a rough measure suppose that the 
> minimum wage would rise by 25 percent.  Since low wage workers represent 
> probably 10 percent of the cost of production, this would represent a 2.5 
> percent increase in costs.  If this was spread over a two-year period, then 
> for those years the CPI might rise by as much as 1.25 percent as a result of 
> the minimum wage hike.  This is a high estimate for some of the reasons 
> mentioned in the previous posting but SO WHAT!
> 
>The left has to accept the fact that policies to increase wages, 
> independent of productivity changes, are necessarily going to be somewhat 
> inflationary.  There is no question that if we had more robust growth, 
> driving the unemployment rate down to 4 percent, wage increases would be 
> somewhat inflationary.  
> 
>Inflation should never be considered a "bad" which must be avoided.  If 
> it helps redistribute income to workers we favor it!  That is why we are for 
> moving up the Phillips Curve by driving down unemployment.  Of course, if 
> there would be an ever increasing wage-price spiral resulting in 
> hyperinflation we would be against that.  However, as Robert Eisner has 
> shown this is a scare tactic since given contour wage bargaining, 
> productivity stimulated changes, and other factors, the inflation rate would 
> rise only modestly to reach a stable higher rate.
> 
>Thus, we should say to the student, "Yes, a rise in the minimum wage will 
> very modestly increase the CPI but the benefits outweigh any harm that is 
> done as a result of inflation." 
> 

[PEN-L:6530] Re: Why raise the minimum wage? (fwd)

[Tavis Barr]

As long as we're in pretty-little-curve land, try this one on your student:

The low wage labor market (or any labor market for that matter) has 
features that mainstream economists normally associate with monopsony, 
even when there are plentiful employers.  This may be because workers 
have heterogenous tastes for working conditions, or an optimal location 
and a distaste for commuting, etc.  In any event, firms can attract more 
workers by raising the wage.  Therefore they behave like monopsonists.  
Therefore they set the wage at a level that is too low for full 
employment.  If the wage were raised, firms would actually hire more workers.

I don't know of any direct empirical evidence for this theory except an 
unfinished paper of mine that looks at differences in the premium to 
commuting between small and large firms.  However, the best empirical 
study of the minimum wage, by Card and Krueger, shows that minimum wages 
seem to have a positive employment effect.

Another possibility is that minimum wages raise the wage share of labor, 
hence consumption, particularly of the type of goods that are generated 
by the low-wage labor market.

By the way, minimum wages don't shift the supply curve inward.  They just 
make it an inverse L-shape.  In other words, they do this:

W/o Min W/ uneffective Min  W/effective Min

 DS  DD  S
  D  SDDS 
   DS  DS  SDSSS
   SD  SDD
  S  DS  DD
 SD SSDD
S  D   DD

(as if labor markets really acted like this,  Sigh)

Anyway, I think your student is thinking of wage-push inflation theories, 
which are simply an unproven absurdity.  Ask your student if he believes 
in rent-push theories: If the wage share of income falls, then the profit 
share goes up.  If the profit share of income gets too high, then 
investors reinvest more profits.  But there is only so much produced in a 
given year.  Hence the demand for captial goods caused by these 
investments creates inflation.  Of course it's a stupid notion.  But it's 
just the flip-side of a wage push.


Good luck,
Tavis



On Tue, 8 Oct 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


> A student asked why raise the minumum wage? He made the argument that any
> rise in the minimum wage would shift product supply curves inward thus
> leading to rising prices. This inflation would be exacerbated by rising
> incomes which would shift product demand curves outward. So, the student
> said, any policy that raises the minumum wage would just lead to inflation
> and unemployment, and why would we want that?
> 
> Any suggestions about how to respond to this student?
> 
> Since I am not on PEN-L, you can respond to me privately at
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or if you respond via PEN-L, I will also get the
> response via forward from a friend.
> 
> Thank you for any thoughts you might have.
> 
> Enid Arvidson
> 
> **
>
> Enid Arvidson 
> School of Urban & Public Affairs   office: (817) 272-3071/3349
> University of Texasfax:(817) 794-5008
> Arlington, TX 76019email:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> 

[PEN-L:6340] Re: U. S. State Income Distribution

[Tavis Barr]

You could use the CPS, which has about 300,000 participants yearly; the 
trouble is that it's top-coded at $75-99,000 'til '92 and at $199,000 
since then, so you will miss the richest 1-2% in calculating the Gini 
Coefficient.  You can extrapolate using the Mills Ratio if you assume 
that income is normally distributed, which seems generally not to be too 
bad an assumption.  But you might have better luck using the Survey of 
Income and Program Participation, which is smaller (about 5-15,000 in 
each panel) but has a much higher top-coding if any.  I'm usingthe CPS 
for a project to match state-level variance in ln wages with 
uniuonization rates; I can give you that data if you like.


Cheers,
Tavis

On Tue, 24 Sep 1996, Doug Henwood wrote:

> At 10:26 AM 9/24/96, Jim Westrich wrote:
> 
> >Does anyone know of any attempts  to measure the income distributions of
> >the U. S. states (gini coefficients would be ok)?   Or data sets rich
> >enough to do it yourself?  If you know of any work in this direction I
> >would be most interested and grateful to hear about it.  I will post
> >results if any.
> 
> The Census Bureau doesn't publish this data, because Current Population
> Survey sample are too small, but you could get the CPS tapes, run the
> numbers yourself, and average several years (like they advise doing with
> the poverty data - usually 2 or 3 year averages). Also, the recent Citizens
> for Tax Justice/Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy study of state
> tax systems has income data - which, unlike the CPS, doesn't top-code the
> income. CTJ is at 202-626-3780, or www.ctj.org.
> 
> Doug
> 
> --
> 
> Doug Henwood
> Left Business Observer
> 250 W 85 St
> New York NY 10024-3217
> USA
> +1-212-874-4020 voice
> +1-212-874-3137 fax
> email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> web: 
> 
> 
> 

[PEN-L:6159] Re: cobb-douglas

[Tavis Barr]

To answer this question completely would take a whole tome.  The short 
answer is that the empirical estimates of the "production function" are 
meaningless barring stringent assumptions.  Suppose, just for a minute, 
that there really is "perfect competition" neoclassical style and that 
there really is a constant-returns-to-scale production function 
(required for NC PC).   In this case, ANY CRS (i.e., linearly 
homogeneous) production function has the property that

Y(k,l)  =   k * dy/dk   + l * dy/dl  ,

so that all you are really estimating empirically is the marginal 
products of labor and capital and the labor and capital shares of the 
economy, regardless whether the underlying production function is 
Cobb-Douglas or not.  Anwar Shaikh has a sharp and typically 
obnoxious piece on this in the Palgrave volume on capital theory.

Now, relax the perfect competition assumption and replace it with 
monopolistic competition.  It turns out that the parameter estimates on k 
and l are not equal to dy/dk and dy/dl, but with dy/dk(1-Q) and 
dy/dl(1-Q), where Q is the elasticity of demand.  Therefore the 
coefficients adding up to one is not necessarily a sign of CRS.  A good 
mainstream advanced macro textbook like Blanchard and Fischer will 
probably have something on this.

Suppose further that income distribution affects product demand, and that 
in particular workers consumer a higher percentage of their income than 
capitalists.  In this case, the marginal product of labor is determined 
only _after_ the aggregate wage level is determined, i.e., there is (what 
you might have seen called in your econometrics books) simultaneity 
bias.  Drop the assumption of constant returns to scale and this bias 
will be amplified.  Again, see the Palgrave on capital theory and look in 
particular at the bits on post-Keynesianism and the Cambridge controversy.

Hope this helps.  Don't let the PC police (perfect competition, that is) get 
you down.


Best wishes from a lowly PhD student,
Tavis


On Fri, 13 Sep 1996, Ted Kuster wrote:

> I, a lowly master's degree student, seek enlightenment. The
> macro course I took last semester was based on a new text by
> Alan Auerbach (UC Berkeley) and Lawrence Kotlikoff (NBER), who
> present a version of "generational accounting" that rests on a
> master Cobb-Douglas production function for the whole economy
> which you can tinker with by manipulating returns to capital or
> labor or the technology level or some other things. (The book
> includes a software package to let you do this.) I have been
> trying to figure out a context to place this stuff in, but am
> confused. (A&K, faithful to pedagogical tradition in econ, offer
> no context at all but just wade right into the math.) My best
> guess is that this is basically an updated version of an
> aggregate production function a la Wicksell (what Robinson
> called a "pseudo-production function") which was supposed to
> restore general equilibrium after Keynes, with a lot of bells
> and whistles and ASCII spreadsheets worked in. Robinson's
> critique, if I understand it, was that this kind of thing did
> nothing to save general equilibrium from Walras-style
> timelessness, because it gave no convincing mechanism for the
> central relationships to work through, and time, if anything,
> ran at right angles to the page, as I think she put it. Is
> anyone familiar enough with this stuff to help me figure out
> what is going on here?
> 
> Ted Kuster
> 
> 

[PEN-L:5737] URPE Summer Workshop

[Tavis Barr]

Is anybody driving to the URPE summer workshop from New York, and if so, 
could you give me a ride?  Does anybody have the schedule and 
registration information?


Thanks for your help,
Tavis

[PEN-L:5662] re: Lexis

[Tavis Barr]

On Tue, 13 Aug 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


> What upset me the most was that my ss#, which is supposed to be used for tax
> purposes only, is being illegally used by an online network to which I have
> never subscribed!!!  I mentioned to the lexis person that tracking people by
> ss# is illegal and she went into a whole prepared speech about this being a
> legitimate address locator.  If this is so, then why track people by ss# and
> why record previous addresses?

I thought that it ws only illegal for the government (aside from the IRS) 
to track you by your SS#, but that private companies could use it however 
they choose.  Or is there some law about non-consensual use?

Curious,
Tavis

[PEN-L:5086] re: efficiency

[Tavis Barr]

Jim,

I'll bite.  It seems to me that what you're criticizing is much mroe 
generally the value of modelling economies mathematically than just the 
A-D GE model (unless by A-D you mean specifically Walrasian equilibrium, 
which I agree is irrelevant enough to be useless).  These models tell us 
that if we assume certain things we can conclude certain things. 
Neoclassicals showed that if we assume CRS and "rationality" then money 
is neutral; neo-Keynesians have shown that if we assume IRS, monopolistic 
competition, and menu costs, then money will not be neutral.   Robin's 
book on welfare economics (which I hadn't heard of till he mentioned it 
and am now reading) shows that if we allow for endogenous preferences, 
market economies may move in a direction that increasingly warps human 
development.  I rather suspect that with more work (particularly work 
based on a conflict theory of the firm), all of the conditions 
that are sufficient to generate optimality of the market will prove 
necessary conditions and also that they won't generally hold. 
 
I don't see a need to counterpose this line of research to "a political 
economy which inherently involves time, money, disequilibrium, history, 
production" etc., though aside from history and holistic structure 
I'm not sure what of these can't be incorporated into some extended GE 
framework (one that you mention, democracy, has been incorporated into 
some mainstream models, viz. Alesina & Rodrick; Alesina & Perotti), 
with the limitations inherent in formalizing anything.  No model, let alone 
any GE model, is going to explain every economic phenomenon or is 
appropriate for every line of research.   Historical and political 
discussions can be made more relevant; formal models can be made more 
rigorous.  Which one chooses to use in a given circumstance is, I think, 
a matter of taste and idiosyncratic judgement.  But the mathematical 
theory  has, I think,  proved fruitful in understanding the consequences 
of certain economic assumptions.


In strudel,
Tavis


On Wed, 10 Jul 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> It should be clear from the tone of my rhetoric above that I 
> favor the latter. I prefer a political economy which inherently 
> involves time, money, disequilibrium, history, production, 
> conflict, holistic structure, non-market institutions, and 
> contradictory dynamics (rather than having these as alien 
> impurities, as in the A-D GE model). 
> 
> The use of the A-D GE model in ways that indicate that real-world 
> markets under capitalism are inefficient suggests that the A-D GE 
> model could somehow be feasible in the real world. It also 
> implicitly rules out other criteria, such as the extent to which 
> an economy lives up to democratic standards. This is a real 
> problem, in that the A-D GE model is so abstract that it is 
> inherently normative. 
> 
> in pen-l solidarity,
> 
> Jim Devine   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ., 7900 Loyola Blvd.
> Los Angeles, CA 90045-8410 USA
> 310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950
> "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way
> and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
> 
> 
> 
> 

[PEN-L:5071] Re: Efficiency

[Tavis Barr]

Following is one of my typically inept attempts to try to answer Maggie, 
Jerry, and Barkley in one swell foop:

I'm not trying to claim that Marx's theory of crisis was a thorough 
description of capitalist inefficiency or even a good one (though I 
agree with it).  The point was merely in response to 
Maggie's query, is there such a thing as a concept of efficiency outside 
of NC economics?  Doug Orr mentions a couple of concepts of efficiency such 
as minimizing waste and minimizing energy expended for a given task, and 
I think that the factories-sit-idle-while-people-starve phenomenon (or, 
in 20thc lingo, essential goods are scarce while people who could produce 
them are unemployed) qualifies under both of these.

This particualr critique of capitalism is not a thorough one.  Maggie 
raises a lot of good questions such as worker satisfaction and peace of 
mind that are not included in it.  Perhaps I wan't being clear enough: 
I'm not claiming that Marx's theory shows that there is a (unique or 
otherwise) optimal outcome and that capitalism doesn't reach it; rather, 
that there are outcomes which would be better for everyone except 
possibly the capitalists that are infeasible under capitalism.  Thus it 
is a theory of _relative_ inefficiency rather than _absolute_ efficiency.  
Since Marx put so much emphasis on the development of the human species 
as a long-term historical process, I doubt he would have believed in the 
latter.  I think such critiques can be powerful, since they show plainly 
the "irrationality" of capitalism for all but the very few.  If different 
concepts of relative efficiency conflict, one then  has political 
arguments over which inefficiencies are more important (of course, the NC 
instinct would be to try to quantify the opposing concepts in one of the 
most laughable displays of pseudo-objectivity possible; or perhaps this 
is left for the political scientists?).

None of this gets at the question of optimality, which, given conflicts 
of interest, is a largely unquantifiable concept.  That's why people 
vote :)




Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:5037] Re: Hedonism

[Tavis Barr]

On Tue, 9 Jul 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> Barkley Rosser notes, correctly, that there is no way to measure efficiency
> outside the nc framework.  I would take this a couple of steps further:


I'm not sure about this.  For example, a sound-bite image of what Marx 
meant by capitalist crisis in Vol. 3 might be something like: Factories 
sit empty while people are out of work and suffering from lack of goods 
that those factories could produce.  Isn't that a form of inefficiency?

Yours for the squabble after the revolution,
Tavis

[PEN-L:5032] Re: Careerist Party Caudillo scapegoats ex-rank & file

[Tavis Barr]

Written by space aliens or runaway computers?  Enquiring minds wanna know.

Ever the imperialist running dog,
Tavis



On Tue, 9 Jul 1996, neil wrote:

> Dear Friends,
> 
> 
>  In his Det#115 and other ravings, Joseph Green, caudillo of his CVO 
> Detroit "anti-revisionist" sect has gone ballastic over  my postulating  
> some theories of capitalist decadence which far from "repudiating
> Leninism" goes far to try to  bring bolshevism up to date in many
> ways.
> 
> The theores of capitalist decadence are not my own inventions but are the
>  basic political-economic critiques of  the Left-communist trend, the
> best of those coming from the Communist Workers Organization -UK,
> Box 338, Sheffield S3 9YX, UK.
> Another C-L grouping is the Int'l Communist Current, PO Box 288,
> NY, NY, 10018.
> You can contact them for updated texts/journals on the theory.
> 
> Joseph/CVO consider those who don't hold up every leter and comma of 
> Marx-engels and Lenins works (previously Stalins, Mao's and Hoxha's
> too) as heretics , infidels against the true Josephus/CVO sect.
> 
> The views i put forward  on decadence were just a smattering of the 
> whole concept but basically we can say that decadene recognizes
> the decline of capitalism is far from being exhausted and many questions
> still not answered (admission of this fact will prove to Josephus
> that it must be errant!)
> 
> These last five decades has posed a whole series of new problems
> for revolutionary theory and practice. Many problems still need 
> resolution. But a few things can be gleaned which make the 
> Josephus doctrines outmoded and impotent.
> 
> 1)Proletarian revolution has been on the agenda since WW1.
> 2)Traditioalism leftism of many  revolutionaries are now out of date.
> 3)Tactics valid in the 19th Cent. have become part of the bourgeois state 
> institutionaled method today
> a)parliamentarianism
> b)unionist struggle schemes
> c)so-called bourgeois ' national liberation struggles"
> 
> This leads us to the recognition of decadence since WW1 which 
> is incoporated into an up-dated world view for struggle.
> 
> The relativly reduced and stunted growth in the dominant world
> capitalist production relations. (1)
> The developement of the state apparatus and its control over the
> whole society--the general tendency toward state capitalism.
> The periodic massive eruptions of calss antagonisms and thupsurge of
>  proletarian revloutionary movements that can call into question 
> the world system of capitalist imperialism.
> The accelerated decompostion of bourgeois ideological values &
> open tendencies back to barbarism and reaction.
> The inordinate developement of un-productive sectors of production-
> guns/arms/bombs/missiles, etc at the expense of productive sectors.
> The appearance world crisis followed by world wars on a regular scale
> which are more barbaric and genocidal with each offensive.
> 
> All this shows the definitive inability of waged labor domination
> to fulfull the historic need of humanity.
> Those who claim to support revolution today and kiss-off the reality 
> of decadence , cannot really understand the materail/social phenomena
> of the the present stage in the laws of motion of capitalism.
> If we give the ascendant/decadent critique of capitalism its due,
> we can help bring up to date our present horse and buggy relutionary 
> practice.
> 
> Joseph/CVO still wish to cover up for their own dead Hoxha-ism,
> Pol Pot-ism, UNITA-ism, etc, et. al. For Joseph religion , theworld 
> today stands still, at least since the death of Lenin.
> 
> Joseph the poltroon demands the  rank and filers of his ex-MLP 
> instead take the blame for his own idiotic and counter-revolutionary
> views and actions. Joseph was the top honcho of the ex-MLP.
> He, 25 years the political parasite on the movement , the continual
> Capo de tut de Capo- uber alles en die welt! Now he stoops to
> his lowest of the low blaming me and other rank and filers of thex-MLP
> for his Stalinism!
> 
> In the ex-MLP, our cde. Carl temporarily quit the MLP in 1982 and returned
>  in 1984 protesting the "socialist" label given to Albania by Joseph & co.
> I put forward an admittedly shallow critique of state capitalism thru
> the Bay Area and directly in 1986-7 which was not appreciated much by
> Joseph & Co. These efforts were puny, but we tried to help change things.
> 
> 
>  But In Det#115, Joseph says  a former ex-MLP SYMPATHIZER for 11 years
> and CANDIDATE MEMBER for 1 and a half years must bear the burden of guilt
> for the outmoded and impotent views of Mr. Caudillo of the CC Joseph
> and his clique. He and his clique dictate who is sacrificed for them.
> By this travesty and others, Joseph has shown his political
> dishonesty. We should go light on him however. He should be 
> told to end his career of political parasitism, fold his tent,
> go out and get a regular job , stop feeding off the workers,
> and find out what the rest of us put up wi

[PEN-L:5021] Re: Hedonism

[Tavis Barr]

On Tue, 9 Jul 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> To Tavis B.
>  Of course if preferences are well ordered and convex and
> technology and resources are suitably well behaved an Arrow-
> Debreu equilibrium exists.  But so what?  The criticism is indeed
> on the lines of the autonomy of preferences.  They are socially
> determined, they are bought, etc.  Also, there is strong evidence
> that they are not "well ordered" in the Arrow-Debreu sense, and
> for some people some of the time they are not convex, which was
> the starting point of this thread, if I remember correctly.

Fair enough.  The original thread was on the consistency of utility 
theory.  Some suggested that the theory fell apart if preferences were 
socially determined.  My point was that the result of market prices 
somehow being "optimal" fell apart, but that the theory was still 
usable.  You seemed to be defending (though I'm not sure since it was by 
way of example rather than statement) a previous post (I can't remember 
whose) that suggested that commodities did not provide pleasure, except 
inasmuch as they provide people with the ability to continue habitual 
behavior.  This would, indeed, be deadly for utility theory, since it 
provides no basis to evaluate hypothetical consumption bundles, and also 
because it might imply that people with different levels of consumption 
would be just as happy with their respective consumption bundles 
provided that those bundles are habitual.  I disagree (I went into more 
detail in my response to  Terry) since I think that enjoyment of 
commodities is developed by an interaction of social acceptance and 
physical stimulation and not (usually) by either one alone. 

I grant that equilibria won't exist if preferences aren't convex, however 
this strikes me as a somewhat arbitrary critique for radicals to make, 
i.e., there are no real politics of non-convex preferences.  I'm less 
concerned about the production sets since I think the NC theory of the 
firm is so bad as to be pretty much useless.  My question was more along 
the lines of, if we don't like utility theory, what would be a better 
approach?


>  I do not have an answer to how to measure "efficiency" outside
> of the NC or some related framework such as dynamic programming
> (central planner plugs in objective function).  Does it matter?
> Perhaps other goals such as sustainability and equality matter more.

I don't defend any NC notions of efficiency and I agree with your point.
I was referring to the word in a slightly different sense: When labor 
values determine prices, one of the assumptions is that labor is 
efficiently exploited, i.e., firms that make useless goods go out of 
business quickly.  This essentially assumes a theory of demand without 
ever spelling it out.  Perhaps this is a time for a Marxologist like Jim 
to tell me I'nm wrong, but my sense and my recollection from reading 
Capital is that Marx never worked out what determined why people bought 
some commodities and not others.  NC utility theory does, and this gives 
it some original value.  


Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:5020] Re: Hedonism

[Tavis Barr]

On Tue, 9 Jul 1996, Terrence Mc Donough wrote:

[about whether one enjoys beer for itself or for social belonging]

> I suppose there may not be much difference as far as neoclassical 
> utility theory is concerned.  To do what Tavis suggests you have to 
> put social belonging in the utility function.  This could be done 
> but- 
> 
> 1) it almost never is.  I will bet a significant portion of my future 
> utility that noone has ever illustrated indifference curves in intro 
> classes by trading off widgets and social belonging.   What claims 
> scientists make when under interrogation by other experts (always use 
> the passive voice, never make an unqualified statement, etc) is 
> different from what they say in less formal contexts.  When they "get 
> down" neoclassical theorists really do think that 
> happiness=consumption goods is a useful and not too distorted 
> description of human psychology.

Granted.  I think my original point was against objections (not yours) that 
it _couldn't_ be put in.  Perhaps I'm being pathological, but then, this 
is an academic discussion list :)

> 
> 2)when you start putting all these other things in the utility 
> function, as Jim D pointed out, the theory becomes completely 
> tautological.  People do what they do because all things considered 
> they prefer to do it over the next best alternative.  I can agree 
> with this statement, I just don't think is says anything particularly 
> meaningful. 

Again, I agree.  The meainingful part is that one can describe economic 
allocations based on a sum of individual decisions (heterodox economists 
will no doubt want to build elite influences on the legal and social 
boundaries of these decisions into any model as well).  NC's would argue 
that this means that this means that allocations reflect maximizing a 
weighted sum of people's happiness, and, for the reasons you've pointed 
out and more, this is not terribly accurate.  However, I think that being 
able to model these allocation processes has some value in itself.  
Particularly, if we can separate out and identify the various effects of 
different factors in the formation of tastes, and the consequent effects 
of those created tastes on the allocation of resources, we may learn 
something  about how hegemony is created.  Or it may be a fruitless 
mathematical exercise.  But at least the possibility is interesting.

I wrote:

> > I'll buy the first sentence, though again, the endogeneity of income to 
> > wants is not necessarily deadly for utility theory.  For example, one 
> > could have a multi-period model where one period's tastes are determined 
> > by the previous period's consumption.  All of the neoclassical results 
> > would then hold for a given period, given the previous period's economy.

And Terry responded:

> The initial period would consist of a consumption basket determined 
> by producers or perhaps blind custom or perhaps history.  Consumer 
> sovereignty is lost in the model Tavis proposes and it consequently 
> has no political point from the perspective of bourgeois ideology.  
> It will not get a hearing within neoclassical economics.

But it is nonetheless based on utility theory, with an alteration that 
is, mathematically, very minor, even if it has major political 
implications.  Again, my point (and you might not disagree, I'm not sure) 
is that there are alterations of utility theory that have highly 
non-neoclassical results, and perhaps they are worth exploring.  I'm not 
wedded to the theory, and there may be other approaches that prove better 
in the long run; it's just that I don't think it should be dismissed out 
of hand by radical economists.


I wrote:

> > As for the second sentence: Do you really think that the need for 
> > commodities is "seldom directly relevant" to the quantities produced?  Is 
> > it merely coincidence that our society produces a great deal more bottles 
> > of wine than stuffed animals or gallons of milk than bottles fo Vitamin 
> > C, even though these goods have similar production costs and prices?  This 
> > seems like a surprising position.  Please elaborate.

And Terry responded:
 
> The first bottle of wine or gallon of milk may have to do with 
> subsistence but the last bottle most likely does not.  The total  quantity 
> of milk and wine produced has to do with customary consumption not 
> universal human needs.  It would be easy to find societies that do 
> not  produce wine or milk at all  despite the capacity to do so and 
> the need for the caloric intake. 

And later:

> I don't think the process of enjoyment is extra-social.  People with 
> lower income  are much less likely to demand fancy 
> food.  They are also much less likely to enjoy it when given it, 
> prefering food they are accustomed to.


But this is quibbling over definitions of need.  Of course most 
consumption is not for basic nutritional or clothing requirements.  
Nevertheless, while in a sense every non-prim

[PEN-L:5009] Re: Hedonism

[Tavis Barr]

On Mon, 8 Jul 1996, Terrence Mc Donough wrote:

> The problem with lower income doesn't really have directly to do with 
> lower levels of consumption.  Below some minimum, a lack of income 
> will mean exclusion from normal social interaction.  To take a simple 
> example, in Ireland not being able to buy one's round in the pub can 
> result in social isolation.  The stress this puts on family relations 
> can lead to domestic violence and child abuse.  The unhappiness that
>  potentially results from this situation  is not due directly to lowering one's
>  consumption of beer.  Indeed, exclusion from normal social 
> interaction rather than some absolute level of deprivation is the 
> sensible definition of the poverty level.

I'm not sure I understand the difference inasmuch as theory is 
concerned.  Neoclassical utility theory merely requires that people 
derive utility from goods.  It doesn't require that they enjoy them, just 
that the utility is derived from the goods causes them to make allocation 
decisions.  Whether one enjoys the taste of beer or the social belonging 
that one gets from buying a round, one is still deriving utility from beer.

> Secondly, the unequal distribution of income (and property) leads to 
> social inequalities which disempower the lower income groups to the 
> benefit  of the upper income groups.  This has numerous and manifest 
> consequences (among which is the promulgation among academic 
> economists of the idea  that happiness = consumption and the
>  unhappiness that this ideological conviction causes).

No disagreement here, I don't think.  Again, though, I'm not sure that 
this is inconsistent with utility theory.  For example, it is a fairly 
general result that under Walrasian equilibrium, the tastes of rich 
people are weighed much more heavily than those of poor people 
(specifically, that the equilibrium is equivalent to a weighted 
maximization of everyone's utility function, with the weights being the 
inverse of the marginal utility of income).  In order to criticize the 
theory, I think one has to be more specific.


> > o The quote from Schumpeter suggested that people's tastes are determined 
> > by their habits or local production.  Does this amount to suggesting that 
> > differences in utility can be reduced to discourse?  Is there an 
> > underlying "base" of universal human need outside of the context of a 
> > particular discourse, and do human wants determine prices, or merely the 
> > other way around?
> 
> The relationship between prices and wants is dialectical (mutual and 
> simultaneous determination).  There are some base human needs (food 
> and shelter) but they are expressed only in specific cultural 
> contexts and are probably seldom directly relevant to the question of 
> the allocation of resources.

I'll buy the first sentence, though again, the endogeneity of income to 
wants is not necessarily deadly for utility theory.  For example, one 
could have a multi-period model where one period's tastes are determined 
by the previous period's consumption.  All of the neoclassical results 
would then hold for a given period, given the previous period's economy.

As for the second sentence: Do you really think that the need for 
commodities is "seldom directly relevant" to the quantities produced?  Is 
it merely coincidence that our society produces a great deal more bottles 
of wine than stuffed animals or gallons of milk than bottles fo Vitamin 
C, even though these goods have similar production costs and prices?  This 
seems like a surprising position.  Please elaborate.


Barkley wrote, from a different angle:

> The answer to why we can criticize cuts in welfare benefits
> etc. can arise from an "anomoly" known as the "endowment
> effect."  This is a kind of asymmetry in preferences that
> seems to hold for many people that amounts to "having some
> more doesn't make me much happier, but losing some makes
> me a whole lot unhappier."  This was first discovered in
> willingness to pay studies of peoples' desire for environmental
> quality.  Most are not willing to pay much for small improvements,
> but will demand large compensation for any quality reductions.
>  So, cutting poor peoples' wages, benefits, etc. is particularly
> damaging.

I won't disagree with the conclusion.  As an earlier post that I 
responded to mentioned, tastes are determined by habits acquired through 
previous consumption, and therefore, in utility theory terms, depriving 
people of their habitual consumption bundle may cause lower utility 
beyond the loss of utility directly related to those goods.  In fact, it 
could even cause a loss of utility if the marginal utility of those goods 
is zero.  Again, I suspect that a modified utility theory could handle 
this even better than it could handle Terry's stuff.

My main concern, though, is this: Do we really believe that people derive 
no enjoyment from additional consumption?  If so, then, I think, it i

[PEN-L:4967] Re: Hedonism

[Tavis Barr]

I'm not sure where this thread is going.  It's easy enough to point out the 
absurdity of the notion that income is exogenous to tastes, let alone 
relations of production and more generally social pressures.  However 
this is not a sufficient reason to simply discard utility theory.  I 
think it might be better to ask ourselves a few questions:

o  If, as the article below suggests, variance in material well-being 
accounts  for so little of the varianse in hapiness, why do we get so 
upset tat things like falling wages or cuts in welfare benefits?  Is it 
merely that we believe people will become unhappy from having to change 
to unhabitual consumption bundles, or is there generally something _worse_ 
about having lower income?  If so, what is it?

o The quote from Schumpeter suggested that people's tastes are determined 
by their habits or local production.  Does this amount to suggesting that 
differences in utility can be reduced to discourse?  Is there an 
underlying "base" of universal human need outside of the context of a 
particular discourse, and do human wants determine prices, or merely the 
other way around?

o Endogeneity of income to tastes need not disqualify the existence of an 
equilibrium that maximizes the utility of individuals.  As long as 
preferences form a complete preorder, even one that varies among cultures 
and income levels, a utility function will still exist, and an individual 
with a previously determined income and culture can still choose an 
optimal consumption bundle.  Therefore, general equilibrium can still 
exist.  The trouble is that the "utility" function no longer has the 
interpretation of measuring welfare, since it is, in sim eq lingo, a 
reduced form estimator.  Does this make it worthless?  Might it be 
interesting to try constructing utility functions  that can be "bought" 
by adevertising and see what happens?  If the former, what should 
be used in place of utility?  I anticipate that some people will say "labor 
values," and if so, then what determines, in place of a utility function, 
whether labor is being efficiently exploited?

I'm going camping for the weekend on Cape Cod, so I won't be around to hear
answers until Monday.  Sigh


Cheers,
Tavis




On Wed, 3 Jul 1996, Richardson_D wrote:

> 
> The recent discussions of MU here have led me once again to consider some of 
> my long-standing doubts about the foundations of our field.  The basic 
> psychological underpinning of economics is materialistic hedonism: the goal 
> of life is pleasure and pleasure is obtained through commodities.
> 
> While there may have been a general consensus for this in the time of Marx 
> and Mill, we are much less willing to subscribe to it today.  In this light 
> I would like to share excerpts from the Washington Post, June 16, 1996, p. 
> C5.  Author Richard Morin writes a weekly column in the Sunday Outlook 
> section subtitled *New facts and hot stats from the social sciences.*
> 
> 
> The Social Anatomy of Happiness
>  In studies conducted over the past five decades, most people 
> consistently say they*re happy--including the poorest of the poor, the 
> disabled and victims of serious accident, people who you*d think have good 
> reason to be feeling a bit disconsolate.
>  In fact, researchers now suspect that human beings are genetically 
> hard-wired to be happy.  How else to explain why people are so relentlessly 
> rosy about their personal well-being--and why new studies show that money, 
> romance, kids , fancy homes, cars, boats et. al. have surprisingly little to 
> do with personal happiness?
>  Psychologist Ed Diener of the U. of Illinois ... has given beepers to 
> students and had them record whether were feeling happy or not immediately 
> before they were buzzed.  (Eighty percent of the time, they said they were.)
>  One major study asked random samples of people to rate themselves on a 
> 10-point scale that ranges from *most happy* to *most unhappy.*  The average 
> rating for Americans was 7.3 in 1989, the last year data was available, 
> Diener reported in the latest issue of Psychological Science.
>  Overall, he said, studies done in 43 countries found that nine out of 
> 10 people were generally happy, including some folks who would seem to have 
> less to be happy about.  One study found that 68 percent of disabled adults 
> reported they were somewhat to very satisfied with their lives.  *People 
> with chronic mental problems also report positive levels of well being,* as 
> to the poor, victims of bad accidents, the unemployed and under-educated, 
> Diener wrote.
>  So much joy is apparently tough for some somber academics to take. 
>  *Indeed, it is so amazing to some people that quadriplegics and other 
> people with severe disabilities could be happy that their self-reports are 
> dismissed as unbelievable,* he said.
>  ... *The disadvantaged are not quite as happy as the advantaged--but 
> they are st

[PEN-L:4940] Re: Marginal Utility of increasing output

[Tavis Barr]

Let me take a shot at this.  It sounds more like a problem of 
your textbook than one of neoclassical economics (though y.t. is hardly a 
neoclassicist).

General equilibrum models very rarely have money in them except when they 
ask questions specifically about money.  Prices are assumed to equate via 
"Arrow-Debreu securities" that people trade at the beginning of time, 
or in some other way through barter.  Simply throwing in money doesn't 
affect prices, and in general, money will not have real effects in these 
models unless (1) individuals can't maximize ex ante over the whole time 
period, e.g., they only live for a few generations or output is 
stochastic or (2) there are increasing returns to scale and some sort of 
adjustment costs.

These models very rarely assume anything other than diminishing MU.  In 
fact, general equilibrium can look kinda weird with constant MU, just 
because optimizing agents would as soon have all of their consumption in 
the first period (i.e., immediately, before discounts), since one of the 
equilibrium conditions (from the Euler equations) is that the ratio of 
marginal utilities in two periods is equal to the interest rate divided 
by the discount rate.

Diminishing MU need not imply that utility is bounded ("limited wants") or 
even that MU goes to zero, though it may.  It certainly does not imply 
satiation.  Consider the bounded utility function u(x) = 1 - 1/(x+1), x 
> 0, and the unbounded fn u(x) = x - 1/(x-1) which has MU converging to 1.

In general, diminishing MU for goods will be inconsistent with constant 
MU for money.  In an intertemporal framework this can be shown directly 
from the Euler equations above since people will borrow until their 
marginal utilities for income are equated across time and if MU were 
constant this would put all consumption in the first period, which would 
not create the optimal consumption bundle (contradicting the assumption 
that the individual is maximizing utility).  In a static framework money 
is fairly meaningless since it simply serves to reallocate resources and 
then MU's determine prices again.  Since the MU to a net gain in 
resrouces is diminishing, so is the MU to income.
 
The existence of GE does require that the consumer's MU of all goods is 
non-increasing and strictly positive at all attainable points in the 
commodity space (it may exist in some special cases without these 
assumptions but will not in general).

The latter requirement is sort of the methodological starting point for 
the whole Galbraithian critique of NC economics.  Overall, though, I 
think we radicals&marxists have more to learn from attacking NC theories of 
production & price-setting than we do from poking at utility theory.

Thanks for bringing back nightmares from first-year grad school.  :)



Cheers,
Tavis



On Mon, 1 Jul 1996, Blair Sandler wrote:

> 
> 
> I was looking at some Herman Daly, and encountered the point that "the
> marginal benefits of increasing output are decreasing," an implication of
> the law of diminishing marginal utility when applied to GDP.
> 
> The textbook I am currently using for my intro micro course at a community
> college, by Spencer and Amos (not my choice!) derives the demand curve by
> assuming diminishing marginal utility for all specific commodities except
> money, which has a constant marginal utility.
> 
> Now, this is interesting, because the assumption of constant MU of income
> means that while Max U, the stereotypical consumer, can be satiated in his
> desire for any specific commodity, he can never be satiated in his desire
> for consumption in general, i.e. "unlimited wants." (Naturally, the
> textbook does not say anything about this. In fact, even the goal of the
> consumer, to maximize utility (Max U), is mentioned only once and then
> barely more than whispered.)
> 
> Anyway, here's my question for those of you (almost everybody, I imagine),
> who knows more NC theory than I: is this assumption that the MU of income
> is constant standard in NC theory? Essential to it? A simplification of
> this very basic intro text dropped at higher levels? Necessary to the
> assumption of "unlimited wants?" The assumption in Spencer and Amos of
> constant MU of income seems to contradict Daly's statement quoted above.
> 
> Suggestions, comments, questions, feedback of all sorts welcome. Thanks in
> advance.
> 
> Blair Sandler
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> 
> 

[PEN-L:3234] Re: Classics

[Tavis Barr]

Columbia has the luck of having the Barnard economics department, headed 
by the two pretty heterodox economists Duncan Foley and Andre 
Bergstaller.  Bergstaller is teaching a graduate history of economic 
thought course this semester that I'm taking (I think someone does every 
year) and it's pretty good tho I think he and I interpret Marx 
differently (we're still on Smith; Marx starts next week). Of course this is 
all well within the range of the rather talmudic Marxology debates on Pen-L 
that many of us have to own up to participating in...

Cheers,
Tavis



On Mon, 4 Mar 1996, Mike Meeropol wrote:

> An even more interesting question:  how many graduate programs offer a
> course in the History of Thought every year -- even if it's not required?
> 
> -- 
> Mike Meeropol
> Economics Department
> Cultures Past and Present Program
> Western New England College
> Springfield, Massachusetts
> "Don't blame us, we voted for George McGovern!"
> Unrepentent Leftist!!
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [if at bitnet node:  in%"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" but that's fading fast!]
> 

[PEN-L:2059] Re: Hawaiian independence?

[Tavis Barr]

On Tue, 19 Dec 1995, Trond Andresen wrote:

 
> Nobody from the U.S. audience on pen has commented on this. How _do_ you U.S.
> comrades feel about the idea of an independent Hawaii?
> 
> Trond Andresen


Truthfully, Trond, there is next to nothing about it in the US media.  I 
seem to remember a good article in the Village Voice several months ago 
(I'm a New Yorker and although the Voice is in theory a New York paper 
it's also one of the last bastions of true investigative journalism in 
this country so it has some national value as well).  Other than that 
most of the news I've seen is over the internet.  Perhaps other pen-lers 
can correct me if there are are articles in the LA times, or the 
Washington Post, or the Boston Globe, or TV (I refuse to own a working 
TV but it would truly amaze me to see any intelligent reporting), or 
whatever, but I've never seen anything in the New York Times.

>From up here it's really hard to feel like we have much influence.  The 
same sort of goes for Puerto Rico (except that there are a lot of Puerto 
Ricans in NYC so it can make for interesting political discussion, and 
also there's work going on here in support of Puerto Rican political 
prisoners -- but none of this gets far outside the Latino community). 
Basically when things like this happen in US colonies, and it doesn't get 
reported on, nobody on the left is surprised, so they don't do anything, 
and nobody anywhere else actually believes it or they think there must be 
another side to the story they're missing because this is after all the 
land of freedom and democracy.

I have a feeling this isn't really the answer you were looking for, but I 
think it probably gets at the way things feel here more than whatever 
stated political position would.  I guess this sort of answers an 
unstated question about the independence movement more than the idea of 
an independent Hawaii (it's probably a more relevant question; after 
all, I susect you'd answer differently to the two questions "How do you 
feel about a unified Europe?" and "How do you feel about the EC?")
Of course most everybody on the left would support the Hawaiian 
independence movement as a movement for self-determination whatever they 
may personally wish about Hawaii remaining part of the US or not.


Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:1992] Info from France

[Tavis Barr]

I thought some pen-lers might be interested in this little tidbit.

-- Forwarded message --
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 1995 01:02:07 -0500
From: Barbara A. Zeluck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: I talked to Michel tonight

[Personal stuff deleted.  The opening paragraoh explains that Barbara 
talked to a friend from France who is active in the Air France union and 
a member of the Trotskyist-leaning LCR.]

   Air France workers have not budged since their 1993 strike (Michel
led that strike at De Gaulle airport for anyone who doesn't know, and
he's been to several Labor Notes conferences).
   The unions, not the ranks, are leading the current strikes. There are very
debilitating divisions between the leaderships of the union federations,
particularly between the CFDT leadership which is not supporting the
strikes and the other federations.  The CFDT leadership is very much a
minority but it's in control.
   The rank&file are united.
   A general assembly of the railroad workers is scheduled for Friday, Dec.
15.  Since the government has withdrawn its plan for the railroads, it's
feared that the railroad workers will end their strike, isolating the
public workers at whom the Juppe plan's cutting back Social Security is
currently aimed.
   The next big demo has been moved up from Sunday the 17th to Saturday 
the 16th.

[PEN-L:1815] French movement situation (fwd)

[Tavis Barr]

Date: Fri, 08 Dec 1995 13:19:22 +0100
From: x <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: French movement situation

The situation in France is now undoubtedly the biggest social crisis since May
 68. Yesterday was a new action day, and the struggle were bigger than ever.
 There was 2 million strikers (at the peak of the strike in May68, there were
 ten million strikers). The education workers are beginning a reconducible
 strike, and it has been very massive yesterday. The railway and french
 undergrounds are continuing, and they enter their third week of strike, with an
 intact determination. The post and telephone enter the 2nd week, and new
 sectors are coming in, like banks. The strike is also very important in
 electricity (strikers put the price of electricity at night hours) and gaz. The
 private sector seems to begin to move, but remains shy. Nevertheless, the
 strike remains popular (60% approve the strike, according to a poll). It seems
 to be a strike by procuration: the private sector approves the strike, for
 fighting austerity politics since 15 years, but the fear of unemployment
 preven!
 ts private workers (for the moment) to come into. Some private plants have
 nevertheless begun, like TAT-express in Rennes (a private post).
The demonstrations were impressive: 1 million people at leats, in all France, in
 more than 300 towns (French population: 55-60 millions). The demonstrations
 were in a lot of places bigger than in May68. 100 thousand in Marseille (the
 unemployed were leading the demonstration), 70 thousand in Lyon, only 50
 thousand in Paris, but with massive demonstrations in all the suburbs. 35
 thousand in Rouen, comparable only to June36. The most popular slogan in the
 demonstrations was to ask "Juppe resigns". The fighting spirit is very high,
 and the retreat of the plan seems to be a minimum.
Even if the private sector does not enter, the paralisy of transports and post
 begin to make effect, and the necessity of going out is quite clear for the
 bourgeoisie. If schools close,and they have begun, people won't go to work for
 keeping care of children.

A weak point is the auto-organization of the strike. There does not seem to be
 important strike committees (except in Lorient (2 demonstrators for a
 population of 6, and with a 1 demonstration in the neighbour town
 Vannes). The reason is that for the moment hte trade-union directions
 (specially CGT) are quite combative, except the direction of CFDT (which
 approves the plan, Nicole Notat has even proposed to negotiate a minimum
 service transport). If they try to begin negotiations, without retiring the
 plan, they're will be a clash with the basis rank and file strikers.
Another weak point is the fact that students seem to stop their movement, and
 the junction has not been very deep.

For the moment, the government seems to play very badly. They begin to retreat
 on the problem of public workers retirements, but it seems to be too late for
 stopping the movement. They seem to have chosen the clash, for breaking
 trade-unions in their last important sector, the public services (something
 like Thatcher attack in 1984). The bourgeoisie must also make reductions in
 public expenses because of their strategic choice of economic union with
 germany, and the policy of a franc united with the mark. Until a few days, it
 seemed that the bourgeoisie was unanimous, but Wednesday, Charles Pasqua, a
 populist, ex-member of govenment Balladur, euro-sceptic, has asked for another
 politic. He places itself as a recourse for implementing another politic of the
 bourgeoisie, breaking the links between german and french currency. It is a
 sign of division of the bourgeoisie, and of the fear of the right, behind the
 social movement.

What can happen? It seems that the movement can win a retirement of the Juppe
 plan, and a resignation of Juppe Prime Minister, and maybe more, on the
 retirement policy in private sectors, or the wages. It would be the first
 victory against austerity politics in 20 years, and, as such, an incredible
 encouragement for other struggles (like in Italy or Belgium). The paralisy of
 the economy begins to be so important (in Paris mainly) that the government
 must do something. The movement seems to install itself in the long term, with
 national subscriptions. A danger is a backstab of trade-unions bureaucracy, but
 they are for the moment afraid of rank and file members.

I repeat myself, hence I stop. I post also a discussion of Walter's posting.

I'll add that all of the above is my opinion and not an official opinion of any
 organization I belong to.

Bye,
Yves-Marie

[PEN-L:1700] Re: Minimum wages in real terms

[Tavis Barr]

[Sorry, I tried to send this out earlier but my mailer wouldn't let me.]


On Sat, 2 Dec 1995, Paul Zarembka wrote:

> On Sat, 2 Dec 1995, Tavis Barr wrote:
> 
> > The simple fact is that capitalism induces technical change by means of 
> > labor-saving, capital-using technology.  This means that if the rate of 
> > exploitation stays constant (which is what you are arguing for, in 
> > essence, when you call for an output-pegged minimum wage), then 
> > profitability will decline drastically...
> 
> No. The rate of profit r=s/(C+v)=s/v / (C/v + 1)=s/v / [C(s/v+1)/(s+v) + 1].
> 
> That is, with s/v, the rate of exploitation, fixed, the rate of profit only
> goes down drastically when C/(s+v) does up drastically--when the labor time 
> invested in constant capital rises drastically with respect to total labor 
> hours.  

What's the difference?  Assuming zero changes in variable capital, 
increased capital intensity and an increase in the relative labor time 
invested in constant capital amount to the same thing.

 
> There is no motivation for a drastic rise in C/(s+v) in this discussion.  
> Indeed, the real minimum has already been above $7 in 1995 prices (1968, 
> see Fikret's posting of a very useful list of real minimum U.S. wages),
> without even considering productivity changes which lowers "v" when real 
> wages are fixed. 

I just gave a motivation: Capital-using forms of technological change.  I 
can pull out charts showing increased capital intensity of production 
from the 1950s to the 1990s, if you want, but I'm surprised I have to 
dispute it on this list.  Yes, the real minimum was above $7, around the 
same time that the average manufacturing wage was about $15 and growing.  
It was before the ruling class decided that Fordism was unsustainable and 
that they needed to cut into wages to get profitability back up.  If 
wages were higher, who knows, maybe increased consumption spending would 
create enough economic activity to make up for the lost profits, but 
manufacturers in the low-wage, labor-intensive sector would have massive 
adjustment costs if they found themselves having to double their wages.  
This comes at a time when the profit rate is not huge and the system is 
somewhat fragile.

I'd love to see a minimum wage of $10 raised as a demand, if only because 
I think it points to the endemic weaknesses of capitalism and why it 
can't indefinitely sustain wage growth at the same rate as output 
growth.  But let's not kid ourselves that we're going to win it.

Cheers,
Tavis

[PEN-L:1670] Re: Minimum wages in real terms

[Tavis Barr]

Let me take a shot at this.

The simple fact is that capitalism induces technical change by means of 
labor-saving, capital-using technology.  This means that if the rate of 
exploitation stays constant (which is what you are arguing for, in 
essence, when you call for an output-pegged minimum wage), then 
profitability will decline drastically (this is of course ignoring 
endogeneity of wage-induced consumption to output and hence to the rate 
of profit, however I think it would take some pretty strong assumptions 
to show that a dollar in increased wages would lead to a dollar in 
increased profits) .  Yes, perhaps capitalists would survive with a lower 
rate of profit, but it would make the system even more fragile and I 
suspect that the ruling class would be kind of -- how should I say it, 
offended?

YFTR,
Tavis




On Sat, 2 Dec 1995, Paul Zarembka wrote:

> Doug, 
> 
> I'm sorry but you are still misreading me.  I added a P.S. which implied  
> "OK, if the minimum wage is increased to $10, let the average wage 
> increase to $20 if need be". BOTH increases would take us back to 1950 or 
> maybe only 1973 in terms of the labor time returned to workers from their 
> work hours.  THIS IS NOT RADICAL!  (altho I don't mind being radical).
> IT ONLY TAKES US BACK TO AN EARLIER DATE of U.S. capitalism!  If it worked
> then for U.S. capitalism, why not now?
> 
> If we are Marxists are bashful about such a modest request, how are we 
> going to be revolutionaries at any time in our lives?
> 
> You said that a 86% minimum wage ($10) relative to average wages is not 
> possible given average wages.  I responded to let the AVERAGE wages rise
> also (of course, everything is in real terms).  You come back with a 
> repeat of your former statement and adding that " It's just not 
> compatible with capitalism".
> 
> I'm not normally an irritable person, but why cannot direct responses be 
> made to what I messaged?
> 
> Someone else made the statement that minimum wages are much higher in Europe.
> Let's get those numbers and see if capitalism fell into the ocean of a 
> working class revolution (or of barbarism) there.
> 
> Paul Zarembka
> 
> On Sat, 2 Dec 1995, Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> > On Fri, 1 Dec 1995, Paul Zarembka wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > So, what is so radical about a $10 minimum wage, except that Reich is 
> > > talking about $5.15?  The capitalists are robbing the working class blind 
> > > and Marxists tools of analysis help show that.  Actually I am bit 
> > > dismayed by the resistance to these calculations (yours and Jerry's).
> > 
> > Raising the minimum wage to 86% of the present average is a revolutionary 
> > act. It's just not compatible with capitalism. Now that's fine with me - 
> > that's exactly where I'm coming from - but you've got to realize that 
> > this is a challenge to all that's sacred. Might as well demand social 
> > ownership of the means of production while you're at it.
> > 
> > Doug
> > 
> > Doug Henwood [[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > Left Business Observer
> 

[PEN-L:1509] Re: Women in the workforce and Marxism

[Tavis Barr]

On Mon, 20 Nov 1995, Michael Perelman wrote:

> I am convinced that the introduction of affirmative action and the 
> encouragement of women and minorities to enter the labor force was
> part of an effort to break unions and increase the very low unemployment
> rate at the time.

Then perhaps you have an explanation for why unions have been the biggest 
initiators and defenders of affirmative action programs, and continue to 
fight like mad for AA even after most governments are now dropping it?

Confused,
Tavis

[PEN-L:1504] Re: Women in the workforce and Marxism

[Tavis Barr]

According to a rudimantary supply-demand analysis, an exogenous entrance 
of a large number of people into the labor force would decrease the wage 
and increase the natural rate of unemployment; however I think the 
entrance of women into the labor force through the 1970s is not an 
example of an exogenous increase in labor supply but rather an example 
of the pitfalls of answering dynamic questions about capitalist 
accumulation with static models, and also of treating wages as 
exogenous to the labor demand equation (i.e., no effect of consumer 
demand on labor demand).

To start with, it would help to identify which way the causality runs: 
The crisis of profitability and the subsequent decline in real 
wages had begun by the early seventies (wages peaked in 73 as I remember) 
while the entrance of women into the labor force was an artifact of the 
late 1970s.  I think it is reasonable to argue that women in fact entered 
the labor force as much because of increasing economic uncertainty as 
from a change in percieved geneder roles.  What effect did this have?  
For one thing, it commodified many goods (child care, cooking) that had 
formally been products of home production and outside of the relations of 
commodity exchange.  For another, it probably increased demand for consumer 
goods in generatl, which might not have increased given falling real wages 
without longer hours or a larger labor force.  

But in spite of this increase in the labor force, the capital/output 
ratio continued to rise and the rate of profit continued to decline 
throughout the seventies.  So once these dynamic changes are accounted 
for, I suspect it is hard to argue that there was an increasing 
labor/output ratio that would have had the supply-side effects you refer 
to.  Moreover, I think it would be hard to argue that it put pressure on 
organized labor since the unionization rate for women has been fairly 
close to that of men since the early 1980s.  

So on both counts, the entrance of women into the labor market probably 
helped alleviate a crisis of profitability and of stagnating demand for 
final goods.  

YFT#!$&%(,
Tavis

[PEN-L:1206] Re: Quebec Referendum Results

[Tavis Barr]

On Tue, 31 Oct 1995, Elaine Bernard wrote:

> The results of the Quebec referendum with over 90% voting
> was 50.6% no and 49.4% yes.  Hard to imagine a tighter
> vote.

Except maybe the French vote to join the EC, at 50.1 / 49.9 . :|

Vive le plebiscitarianisme,
Tavis

[PEN-L:733] Re: Lucas?????

[Tavis Barr]

Jim --

I suppose we should suggest they give up and just have a prize in applied 
mathematics.  It might put things in a bit more perspective: After all, 
while Lucas is one of the best applied mathematicians in economics 
departments, he could be outclassed by quite a few people in math 
departments.  In his defense, however (this is in response to Barkley 
Rosser) as far as I can tell, Lucas' applications of functional analysis 
to economics are fairly original, specifically his application of 
contraction mapping theorems to market functional spaces and his 
develpment of reasonable conditions to justify applications of those 
theorems.  Or is there a precedent to this type of work (I'm thinking 
specifically of the stuff in _Recursive Methods of Economic Dynamics_) in 
the Operations Research literature?

Unphased and indifferent,
Tavis

[PEN-L:462] Looking for data

[Tavis Barr]

I'm looking for profit rates in manufacturing (and also possibly 
services)  by 3- or preferably 4-digit SIC for as many 
of the postwar years as possible.  If anyone knows where I can look, 
please let me know.

Thanks,
Tavis