More! More!
Michael Eisenscher wrote, >I spent part of the day looking for the entirety of that quote from Gompers, >but did not find it. . . Mies van der Rohe is credited with having said "Less is more." Here's a slightly expanded text: "The office building is a house of work . . . of organization, of clarity, of economy. Bright, wide workrooms, easy to oversee, undivided except as the undertaking is divided. The maximum effect with the minimum expenditure of means. The materials are concrete, iron, glass." Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ knoW Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
[PEN-L:5] More,More,More Extended Reproduction
In Outbox: Your outgoing mail ernst said: Topic 1 JOHN NOW SAYS: WHETHER OR NOT USING PoP OR VALUES MAKES A DIFFERENCE WOULD SEEM TO DEPEND UPON HOW THE TERMS ARE DEFINED. THIS IS A THEORETI- CAL MATTER CANNOT BE SOLVED BY GOING TO THE DATA AS THE QUESTION WOULD BE, "WHAT DATA?" Paul In undergraduate physics I was taught never to plot a data point without putting in error bars. All measurement processes have an inevitable error component, but that does not invalidate measurements provided that one has some handle upon the scale of the errors and provided that these are small relative either to the scale or number of the measures. As I understand it, your feeling is that we can not even estimate what the relative errors involved with measuring organic composition in a) market price terms b) price of production terms c) value terms are, because of the second order errors introduced into our estimates of PoP and values, because of variations in how these are to be defined. In particular, you raise the problem of divergences between values calculated by recursion on a single years I/O tables and the values that would be calculated by using a sequence of I/O tables for succesive years. I presented quite a detailed argument - theoretical - to show that the expected error bars on measures of prices of production and value due to this would be small, under 1% per commodity group. Recall that these are in any case second order errors, our primary concern was to get a handle on how big the first order errors would be. Standard arguments concerning regression to the mean imply that the effect of these on the measures of organic composition would be correspondingly smaller. It should be emphasised that such arguments putting constraints on measurement errors are only possible provided one starts out with some feel for the empirical - thus if the rate of change of productivity were 250% per annum rather than 2.5% per annum, the conclusions would be different. But at the level of pure theory, one can make no such assumptions. One set of parameters in a model is as good as another, which is why Steadmann can produce pathological results by absurd parameterizations of simple models. __ John responds (7/23) No doubt, you were taught how to plot points and take into account error in your days as an undergraduate physics student. (Your course was better than mine.) However, I am certain that in the lab you knew what you were trying to measure. Here, that is the question. Granted you can find data on market prices. But how you move to prices of production and values is not simply by looking at the data. Rather, you have to make some argument(s) as to how this is to be done. I do not mean to throwing road blocks in your way but simply pointing out that in moving from market prices to prices of production and values, you have to and are making a theoretical argument -- like it or not. From what I understand in these movements you are willing to 1. Ignore what capitals actually take part in the process of forming prices of production. 2. Ignore monopoly pricing. 3. Ignore absoute rent. 4. Ignore the concept of market value. __ Topic 2 Paul: No, the very process of treating all of the labours merely in terms of their time dimension abstracts from their concrete character, thus what is being added is abstract labour. JOHN SAYS: WHAT? CONCRETE LABOR DOES HAVE A TIME DIMENSION. LABOR DOES NOT BECOME ABSTRACT BY NOTING HOW LONG HOW LONG IT LASTS. ABSTRACT LABOR IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY ONLY BECOMES ABSTRACT VIA THE MARKET. Paul I disagree here. The market measures the social necessity of labour performed, and in the process abstracts from its concrete form. This however, does not mean that the market is the only computational mechanism capable of performing this abstraction. Any computation of labour times that compares different concrete activities with respect to their time dimensions, performs a similar abstraction. John Continues: ARE ALL CONCRETE LABOR HOURS ABLE TO BE COMPARED WITHOUT REFERENCE TO PRICES THE TASKS PREFORMED TAKE TIME? I THINK NOT. Paul replies: The above is hard to parse. John responds (7/23) Sorry about the last comment. My word processing and e-mail skills still leave something to desired. Yet, I think the basic issue is clear -- the nature of abstract labor. Let's begin by noting that you are computing prices of production and values of commodities. Your claim is that the abstraction of labor from its concrete form can be done without reference to prices. On this point, I am sure you are correct. But the question is, "What is the result?" For example, if I work for 10 hours and you for 10 hours, do we create equal amoun
[PEN-L:32] Re: More,More,More Extended Reproduction
John is basically worried that in preparing empirical tests of hypotheses about marxian theory, one has to make so many simplifying assumptions that the results would be meaningless. In particular he lists: 1. Ignore what capitals actually take part in the process of forming price of production. 2. Ignore monopoly pricing. 3. Ignore absoute rent. 4. Ignore the concept of market value. I dont agree that the last two points, but let us grant them for the momen. Despite these simplification, I and all other workers in the field have found that the simple Marxian labour theory of value is an astonishingly good predictor of market prices, as is the theory of production prices. One finds that they successfully explain 93% to 96% of the observe variation in market prices. Thus the factors that we are ignoring, and which we admit to ignore, along with all sorts of temporary imbalances of supply and demand, accountfor no more than about 5% of the variation in prices. This robustness of the results, that the various distorting factors mentioed have much less effect than you might suppose. John Your claim is that the abstraction of labor from its concrete form can be done without reference to prices. On this point, I am sure you are correct. But the question is, "What is the result?" For example, if I work for 10 hours and you for 10 hours, do we create equal amounts of value? Who decides? Does it all average out from year to year? How do we account for increases in intensity? Paul This raises a very interesting theoretical issue. It depends what you thin you are talking about when you say value. One conception, which I favour theoretically, is to say that one bases ones concept of value upon what labour would be socially necessary to do a task in a society in which labour was directly social. One then can ask the extent to which thi directly social value is actually represented as exchange value in a capitalist economy. In this sense, the only way the average workers labour in one industry conributes more value per hour to the product, is if that industry has training costs whose value is passed on by direct labour to the product. But this can only be computed in a socialist society. One can for a capitaist economy make the simplifying assumption that higher wages in an industry represent the costs of training, and if one does this, one finds, grattifyingly enough, the resulting computed values are closer to market prices than those which disregard higher wages. There is however, an alternative explantation - that there exist grounds for compensation analogous to production prices, that ensure that industris with high wages are able to sell their output above its value. This would apply irrespective of the real cause of the higher wages. Its effect would be to fetishistically 'prove' to the participants in the economy that, for instance, female labour was less valuable than male. One could in principle collect information that would distinguish between these two explanations, but as far as I know nobody has tried it. On rent errors -- Whether one looks at prices of production or values, the same industries are outliers. When I say we exclude them, I mean we compute correlations between values and market prices either over the whole economy, or over the whole economyexcept the high rent industries. What it means to try and distinguish between rent and monopoly as causes of the higher than average output prices of the oil industry is unclear, since rent is itself the result of a (class) monopoly. John Which part of the error is due to "monopoly effects" ? Are the effects growing? Why? Are sectors that are dominated by one or a small number of firms part of the picture in determining the prices of production and values of the others? Could not your technique be missing much as it fails to take account that the monopoly pricing of commoditites takes place both for inputs and outputs? Is the labor more skilled in these sectors and thus creating more value per concrete labor hour than others? Paul These are interesting topics for further research. John talking about stock appreciation So capital stocks are nominally appreciating despite "moral depreciation"? Does capital ever wear out? That is, for Marx, moral depreciation was useful in explaining the differ- ence between the physical life time of fixed capital and its economic life time. What you are saying would seem to imply that given its endless appreciation the physical life of fixed capital is all that matters. Paul Note that all this is in money terms. The reason why accountants take stoc appreciation into account is to try to get back to value measures. The effects of moral depreciation will express themselves in the capital stock after correcting for stock appreciation. John further questions whether taking mean social labour content fo
Re: More! More!
>>Mies van der Rohe is credited with having said "Less is more." > >To which one of the pomo upstarts (Micael Graves?) retroted "Less is more is >a bore". But who could possibly be more post modern than the architect who designed the 1926 Rosa and Karl Liebknecht Monument and went on, in 1933, to submit a neo-classical competition entry for the Reichsbank described by Kenneth Frampton as displaying "an impassive monumentality, which aside from the neutrality of its skin, intended nothing save the idealization of bureaucratic authority." The 1923 quote I cited earlier sounds to me like an "affirmative" flip side of Foucault. BTW, the discussion of 'utopias' is incomplete without an appreciation (and critique) of the emergence and dissemination of architectural utopias. Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ knoW Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Re: More! More!
>Mies van der Rohe is credited with having said "Less is more." To which one of the pomo upstarts (Micael Graves?) retroted "Less is more is a bore". Tom Kruse / Casilla 5869 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-42) 48242 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: More! More!
I am left architecturally speechless -- more or less. At 12:05 AM 12/3/97 -0800, Tom Walker wrote: >Michael Eisenscher wrote, > >>I spent part of the day looking for the entirety of that quote from Gompers, >>but did not find it. . . > >Mies van der Rohe is credited with having said "Less is more." Here's a >slightly expanded text: > >"The office building is a house of work . . . of organization, of clarity, >of economy. Bright, wide workrooms, easy to oversee, undivided except as the >undertaking is divided. The maximum effect with the minimum expenditure of >means. The materials are concrete, iron, glass." > > >Regards, > >Tom Walker >^^^ >knoW Ware Communications >Vancouver, B.C., CANADA >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >(604) 688-8296 >^^^ >The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/ > >
Re: More! More!
Thomas Kruse wrote:
>>Mies van der Rohe is credited with having said "Less is more."
>
>To which one of the pomo upstarts (Micael Graves?) retroted "Less is more is
>a bore".
Actually I think it was Robert Venturi, who learned from Las Vegas ("Las
Vegas is almost all right"). Ironically, of course. Venturi is a font of
aphorisms - another that sticks in my mind from 22 years ago is "Our
buildings must learn to live with the cigarette machine." And then there
was the prominent but nonfunctioning antenna on the roof of an old folks
home he designed, intended as a symbol of the fact that geezers watch a lot
of TV.
Doug
IMF wants more, more
They have no shame... --- Forwarded Message Follows --- Date: Tue, 21 Apr 1998 17:51:16 -0400 (EDT) Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Robert Weissman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: RE: MAI in IMF http://www.imf.org/external/np/cm/1998/041698a.htm Communique, of the Interim Committee of the Board of Governors of the International Monetary Fund April 16, 1998 [...] Liberalization of Capital Movements Under an Amendment of the Articles 4. The financial crisis in Asia has given heightened attention to the role of capital flows in economic development. The effects of the crisis have not negated the contribution that capital movements have made to economic progress in the Asian countries before the crisis erupted. Rather, the crisis has underscored the importance of orderly and properly sequenced liberalization of capital movements, the need for appropriate macroeconomic and exchange rate policies, the critical role of sound financial sectors, and effective prudential and supervisory systems. The Committee reaffirmed its view, expressed in the Hong Kong Communiqu, last September, that it is now time to add a new chapter to the Bretton Woods Agreement by making the liberalization of capital movements one of the purposes of the Fund and extending, as needed, the Fund's jurisdiction for this purpose. The Committee noted the progress made thus far and the provisional agreement reached by the Executive Board on that part of the amendment dealing with the Fund's purposes. It requested the Executive Board to pursue with determination its work on other aspects, including policy issues, with the aim of submitting an appropriate amendment of the Articles for the Committee's consideration as soon as possible.
more & more stock options
Title: more & more stock options BUSINESSWEEK/JULY 15, 2002 An Overdose of Options Depressed stock prices are prompting companies to issue more options than ever Stock options were supposed to be the great motivator, letting top management reap a share of the gains they produced for shareholders. They certainly enriched smart execs who cashed them in before the stock market tanked. But investors are getting poorer, not richer, as company after company shatters on the rocks of executive fraud, greed, and incompetence. Worse may be yet to come. Companies are still issuing options at a furious clip. In fact, 200 of the largest companies are handing them out in amounts approaching 3% of their outstanding shares every year, more than double the pace of a decade ago. The grant rate is headed yet higher as companies try to compensate executives for the lost value of options they received before stock prices fell. Moreover, with shares down sharply, the standard models used to price options show that companies will have to issue more of them to give executives the same dollar value each year. Though the 3% annual average of option grants may look like peanuts, it could become a large and permanent drag on future share prices. In fact, if the market returns to its historical rate of return of about 10% a year, options will siphon off nearly one-third of company profits by the time they expire in 10 years. Investors will have their pockets picked either by having earnings per share watered down by the additional stock or by corporate spending on share buybacks to control dilution. With a big transfer of wealth to management on the horizon, a shareholder backlash is gathering force. Institutional investors have declared war on runaway option grants and the outsize goodies they bestow on corporate insiders. "The trend is really bad," says Patrick McGurn, director of corporate programs at Institutional Shareholder Services, a proxy-vote advisory firm. It comes when many money managers are bracing for a long period of investment returns well below the 18%-plus levels of the 1990s. Says Lisa Rapuano, a mutual-fund manager at Legg Mason Inc., "There is a smaller pie, and executives continue to ask for more of it. We have to work on making their share smaller." (There's more for members at http://www.businessweek.com/@@P3tFTWYQR5WywAsA/premium/content/02_28/b3791100.htm?se=1) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: more & more stock options
Problem is, options don't work in a bear market. At Sun, they've given out options a couple of times since the stock price slide (120s to 5) -- but the problem is that since the stock is heading down relentlessly, a few weeks after you get say 1000 options at 18, the stock goes "underwater" to under 18, so they're worthless. ...and it sure looks to me like a bear market. Joanna At 12:18 PM 07/08/2002 -0700, you wrote: BUSINESSWEEK/JULY 15, 2002 An Overdose of Options Depressed stock prices are prompting companies to issue more options than ever Stock options were supposed to be the great motivator, letting top management reap a share of the gains they produced for shareholders. They certainly enriched smart execs who cashed them in before the stock market tanked. But investors are getting poorer, not richer, as company after company shatters on the rocks of executive fraud, greed, and incompetence. Worse may be yet to come. Companies are still issuing options at a furious clip. In fact, 200 of the largest companies are handing them out in amounts approaching 3% of their outstanding shares every year, more than double the pace of a decade ago. The grant rate is headed yet higher as companies try to compensate executives for the lost value of options they received before stock prices fell. Moreover, with shares down sharply, the standard models used to price options show that companies will have to issue more of them to give executives the same dollar value each year. Though the 3% annual average of option grants may look like peanuts, it could become a large and permanent drag on future share prices. In fact, if the market returns to its historical rate of return of about 10% a year, options will siphon off nearly one-third of company profits by the time they expire in 10 years. Investors will have their pockets picked either by having earnings per share watered down by the additional stock or by corporate spending on share buybacks to control dilution. With a big transfer of wealth to management on the horizon, a shareholder backlash is gathering force. Institutional investors have declared war on runaway option grants and the outsize goodies they bestow on corporate insiders. "The trend is really bad," says Patrick McGurn, director of corporate programs at Institutional Shareholder Services, a proxy-vote advisory firm. It comes when many money managers are bracing for a long period of investment returns well below the 18%-plus levels of the 1990s. Says Lisa Rapuano, a mutual-fund manager at Legg Mason Inc., "There is a smaller pie, and executives continue to ask for more of it. We have to work on making their share smaller." (There's more for members at http://www.businessweek.com/@@P3tFTWYQR5WywAsA/premium/content/02_28/b3791100.htm?se=1) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
RE: Re: more & more stock options
Title: RE: [PEN-L:27753] Re: more & more stock options joanna writes:>Problem is, options don't work in a bear market. < right, but BW says that that's making companies issue more of them -- and, more importantly, encourages the "market" to be even more bearish. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
[PEN-L:5976] More-- More Extended Reproduction
Paul and others, Here's a response to Paul's message of 7/21. To continue the dialog I have put my responses in upper case. Paul This is more of my extended exchange with John on the role of empirical measures in Marxian economics. The questions are quite technical, but I regard the questions as important since I think they reflect a bias by many Marxian economists against empirical work. It is a bias that I have encountered myself from referees of papers when trying to get empirical work published. My feeling for some 20 years has been that this bias is unjustified and that whenever one carries out an empirical investigation the result is both enlightening and usually favorable to Marxism vis a vis its critics. JOHN NOW WRITES: I THINK THE BIAS IS THE OTHER WAY AROUND. John Ernst wrote As Freeman and Kliman have argued on these lists, it is fairly simple to show that by using historic and not simultaneous valuation one obtains a falling rate of profit in cases where simultaneous valuation would yield a rising or steady rate of profit. Paul I am in full agreement that tehnlogical change leading to a decline in the labour content of currently produced capital goods will lead to a loss on capital accounts due to capital depreciation. This will have the effect of reducing the effective rate of profit. What I was questioning was whether using values or PoP makes any difference to ones result for the rate of profit. This is something I very much doubt. If you think that it does make a difference, you should be able to make measurements to show that it does - given that most capitalist countries publish reasonably detailed economic statistics. This is a different question from the one you raise above. JOHN NOW SAYS: WHETHER OR NOT USING PoP OR VALUES MAKES A DIFFERENCE WOULD SEEM TO DEPEND UPON HOW THE TERMS ARE DEFINED. THIS IS A THEORETI CAL MATTER CANNOT BE SOLVED BY GOING TO THE DATA AS THE QUESTION WOULD BE, "WHAT DATA?" THE MANNER IN WHICH THE DECLINE IN LABOR VALUES OR PoP IS REALIZED IS ALSO PARTLY A THEORETICAL MATTER. THAT IS, WHAT PART OF THE GROSS PROFIT IS NET PROFIT AND WHAT PART COSTS, INCLUDING "MORAL DEPRECIATION", IS NOT SIMPLY AN EMPIRICAL QUESTION TO BE ANSWERED BY LOOKING AT THE DATA. John goes on to ask: Consider all of the questions and problems we seem to abstracting from in order to obtain your results. Here are a few. 1. To obtain values you simply sum concrete labor times. Is this valid? Paul: No, the very process of treating all of the labours merely in terms of their time dimension abstracts from their concrete character, thus what is being added is abstract labour. JOHN NOW SAYS: WHAT? CONCRETE LABOR DOES HAVE A TIME DIMENSION. LABOR DOES NOT BECOME ABSTRACT BY NOTING HOW LONG HOW LONG IT LASTS. ABSTRACT LABOR IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY ONLY BECOMES ABSTRACT VIA THE MARKET. ARE ALL CONCRETE LABOR HOURS ABLE TO BE COMPARED WITHOUT REFERENCE TO PRICES THE TASKS PREFORMED TAKE TIME? I THINK NOT. 2. How do you deal with absolute rent in determining prices of production? Paul: I prepare two sets of statistics, one including industries with a high rent content such as oil and agriculture the other excluding these. When one excludes such industries the fit between values and money prices is, as one would expect, better. I think however, that the rent is question is better understood as differential. JOHN NOW SAYS: FOR RICARDO AND HIS MODERN FOLLOWERS, THE NOTION THAT ALL RENT IS DIFFERENTIAL IS A GIVEN. BUT THIS IGNORES EVEN THE POSSIBILITY OF ABSOLUTE RENT. IT IS RELATIVELY SIMPLE TO MORE FROM VALUES TO PoP IF ONE ASSUMES AWAY ABSOLUTE RENT BUT AS FAR AS I KNOW NOT SO SIMPLE IF ONE INCLUDES ABSOLUTE RENT. 3. How do you deal with monopoly prices in determining prices of production? Paul: I make no special allowances for this, neither does most of the literature on prices of production from Marx on. JOHN NOW SAYS: THE CRUCIAL LITERATURE HERE IS THE TEXT OF MARX'S OWN WORK. IN NOTE 24 (INT EDITION) OF CHAPTER 9 OF BOOK 3, ENGELS POINTS OUT THAT MARX IS ABSTRACTING FROM MONOPOLY PRICES IN CONSIDERING THE TRANSFORMATION OF VALUES TO PRICES. I DO NOT THINK SUCH AN ABSTRACTION CAN BE MADE WHEN DEALING WITH THE DATA YOU SUGGEST. 4. Do modern monetary policies affect the manner in which capitalists incorporate "moral depreciation" into the concept of social value? Paul: Most certainly. During periods of rapid inflation one has the reverse 'moral appreciation' which appears in the national capital accounts as stock appreciation. When computing timeseries for the rate of profit I always compute it net of stock appreciation. JOHN
RE: RE: Re: more & more stock options
Title: RE: [PEN-L:27753] Re: more & more stock options REjoanna writes:>Problem is, options don't work in a bear market. < But when the stock market does start to go up--and a huge overhang of stock options are finally cashed in--what might happen to the stock market? Eric .
Re: RE: Re: more & more stock options
At 12:37 PM 07/08/2002 -0700, you wrote: joanna writes:>Problem is, options don't work in a bear market. < right, but BW says that that's making companies issue more of them -- and, more importantly, encourages the "market" to be even more bearish. Jim Devine Exactly, Joanna
[PEN-L:5984] Re: More-- More Extended Reproduction
JOHN NOW SAYS: WHETHER OR NOT USING PoP OR VALUES MAKES A DIFFERENCE WOULD SEEM TO DEPEND UPON HOW THE TERMS ARE DEFINED. THIS IS A THEORETI CAL MATTER CANNOT BE SOLVED BY GOING TO THE DATA AS THE QUESTION WOULD BE, "WHAT DATA?" Paul In undergraduate physics I was taught never to plot a data point without putting in error bars. All measurement processes have an inevitable error component, but that does not invalidate measurements provided that one has some handle upon the scale of the errors and provided that these are small relative either to the scale or number of the measures. As I understand it, your feeling is that we can not even estimate what the relative errors involved with measuring organic composition in a) market price terms b) price of production terms c) value terms are, because of the second order errors introduced into our estimates of PoP and values, because of variations in how these are to be defined. In particular, you raise the problem of divergences between values calculated by recursion on a single years I/O tables and the values that would be calculated by using a sequence of I/O tables for succesive years. I presented quite a detailed argument - theoretical - to show that the expected error bars on measures of prices of production and value due to this would be small, under 1% per commodity group. Recall that these are in any case second order errors, our primary concern was to get a handle on how big the first order errors would be. Standard arguments concerning regression to the mean imply that the effect of these on the measures of organic composition would be correspondingly smaller. It should be emphasised that such arguments putting constraints on measurement errors are only possible provided one starts out with some feel for the empirical - thus if the rate of change of productivity were 250% per annum rather than 2.5% per annum, the conclusions would be different. But at the level of pure theory, one can make no such assumptions. One set of parameters in a model is as good as another, which is why Steadmann can produce pathological results by absurd parameterizations of simple models. >Paul: No, the very process of treating all of the labours merely in >terms of their time dimension abstracts from their concrete >character, thus what is being added is abstract labour. JOHN SAYS: WHAT? CONCRETE LABOR DOES HAVE A TIME DIMENSION. LABOR DOES NOT BECOME ABSTRACT BY NOTING HOW LONG HOW LONG IT LASTS. ABSTRACT LABOR IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY ONLY BECOMES ABSTRACT VIA THE MARKET. Paul I disagree here. The market measures the social necessity of labour performed, and in the process abstracts from its concrete form. This however, does not mean that the market is the only computational mechanism capable of performing this abstraction. Any computation of labour times that compares different concrete activities with respect to their time dimensions, performs a similar abstraction. John Continues: ARE ALL CONCRETE LABOR HOURS ABLE TO BE COMPARED WITHOUT REFERENCE TO PRICES THE TASKS PREFORMED TAKE TIME? I THINK NOT. Paul replies: The above is hard to parse. On how I deal with errors introduced by rent absolute or differential John now says: FOR RICARDO AND HIS MODERN FOLLOWERS, THE NOTION THAT ALL RENT IS DIFFERENTIAL IS A GIVEN. BUT THIS IGNORES EVEN THE POSSIBILITY OF ABSOLUTE RENT. IT IS RELATIVELY SIMPLE TO MORE FROM VALUES TO PoP IF ONE ASSUMES AWAY ABSOLUTE RENT BUT AS FAR AS I KNOW NOT SO SIMPLE IF ONE INCLUDES ABSOLUTE RENT. In practice it makes no difference whether the effect one observes is attributed to absolute or differential rent. If one plots values/market prices for all industries on a graph certain industries stand out as clear outliers above all the oil production industry, which has a very low value to market price ratio. Similar but smaller effects are evident in oil refining, agriculture and grain processing. According to the theories of rent both oil and agriculture would be expected to show both kinds of rent. One can exclude them from the correlations on either assumption. Monopoly prices --- THE CRUCIAL LITERATURE HERE IS THE TEXT OF MARX'S OWN WORK. IN NOTE 24 (INT EDITION) OF CHAPTER 9 OF BOOK 3, ENGELS POINTS OUT THAT MARX IS ABSTRACTING FROM MONOPOLY PRICES IN CONSIDERING THE TRANSFORMATION OF VALUES TO PRICES. I DO NOT THINK SUCH AN ABSTRACTION CAN BE MADE WHEN DEALING WITH THE DATA YOU SUGGEST. We make no provision for dealing with monopoly prices because our main concern was to compare the validity of the theories of value and of prices of production as determinants of actual prices. Monopoly prices would be expected to introduce errors into both measures, and one assumes that part of the residual error between both values and PoP and market prices is due to such monopoly effects. Moral depre
[PEN-L:6] Re: More-- More Extended Reproduction
JOHN NOW SAYS: WHAT? CONCRETE LABOR DOES HAVE A TIME DIMENSION. LABOR DOES NOT BECOME ABSTRACT BY NOTING HOW LONG HOW LONG IT LASTS. ABSTRACT LABOR IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY ONLY BECOMES ABSTRACT VIA THE MARKET. ARE ALL CONCRETE LABOR HOURS ABLE TO BE COMPARED WITHOUT REFERENCE TO PRICES THE TASKS PREFORMED TAKE TIME? I THINK NOT. ___ How does this happen, i.e. "via the market" John? What kind of market is this? Cheers, ajit sinha
Re: RE: RE: Re: more & more stock options
At 12:48 PM 07/08/2002 -0700, you wrote: RE joanna writes:>Problem is, options don't work in a bear market. < But when the stock market does start to go up--and a huge overhang of stock options are finally cashed in--what might happen to the stock market? Eric . Exactly, Joanna
