[PEN-L] Iraqi National Unity Government Goes Pffft
http://www.juancole.com/2007/08/142-dead-in-heat-wave-of-violence-5_02.html
[PEN-L] Opening a Discussion of Feed-In Tariffs in North America
If you know about, or are interested in, Feed-In Tariffs, please contact Paul Gipe. Paul has been instrumental in getting Ontario to adopt the Feed-In Tariff model. I mentioned Feed-In Tariffs in http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2007w30/msg00092.htm Paul's web site has lots of material about Feed-In Tariffs or Advanced Renewable Tariffs. Here is an email from Paul: --- Start of forwarded message --- Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2007 09:03:17 -0400 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Paul Gipe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Opening a Discussion of Advanced Renewable Tariffs in North America Hans, Can you post this request to your list of progressive economists. I am seeking North American economists who are familiar with European feed-in tariffs (what I call in the North American context Advanced Renewable Tariffs) or who are interested in the topic. We launched a successful campaign here in Ontario, Canada by inviting noted economists Hermann Scheer (MdB), Frede Hvelplund (Aalborg Universitet), and Olav Hohmeyer (Flensburg Universitat) to a workshop on the topic in 2004. As you may suspect, ARTs or feed-in tariffs fly in the face of conventional thinking here and I'd like to know of economists who are knowledgeable about thought among continental European economists (Freiburg school for example). I've posted quite a bit of material on this debate at my web site under the subject Feed Laws. See http://www.wind-works.org/articles/feed_laws.html. Paul Paul Gipe Ontario Sustainable Energy Association/Toronto Renewable Energy Cooperative 401 Richmond Street West, Suite 401 Toronto, ON M5V 3A8 Canada +416 977 5093, +661 472 1657 mobile mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED] www.wind-works.org http://www.wind-works.org/books/wind_power2004_french.htmlLe Grand Livre de l'Eolien (ISBN: 2-913620-39-6), 2007. --- End of forwarded message ---
Re: [PEN-L] query: John Elster and methodological individualism
Actually I think methodological individualism is employed as an axiom underpinning free-market ideology. As such it will be claimed as self-evident even though to anyone not already conditioned to accept the axiom this seems blatantly ridiculous. The claim of trivial truth is in effect a blocking mechanism. Someone who questions the axiom must have a screw loose. Or in a more theological metaphor, ought to be shunned by the orthodox economic congregation. Cheers, Ken Hanly --- Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: i think by trivial true he meant the same as Jefferson's phrase, self-evident. Equal bullshit. My source says that Elster hasn't rejected methodological individualism. Rather, he rejected the idea of individual rationality (as economists define it). On 7/31/07, ken hanly [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't know whether he has rejected the view but if it is trivially true then if he rejects it then he contradicts himself. Something that is trivially true is a tautology and is true independently of what may be factually true. A trivial truth contains no information. An example would be: It is raining or it is not raining. This is true independently of weather conditions--of course actually you need to specify time place etc. to get a proposition and its negation disjoined. I think that he is just wrong. Methodological individualism is not trivially true. Cheers, Ken Hanly --- Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In 1989, the sociologist and erstwhile Marxist Jon Elster wrote that The elementary unit of social life is the individual human action. To ex-plain social institutions and social change is to show how they arise as the result of the actions and interaction of individuals. This view, often re-ferred to as methodological individualism, is in my view trivially true. Am I correct to understand that he has since rejected methodological individualism? -- Jim Devine / Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti. (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html -- Jim Devine / Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti. (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. Blog: http://kenthink7.blogspot.com/index.html Blog: http://kencan7.blogspot.com/index.html
Re: [PEN-L] methodological individualism
ken hanly wrote: Actually I think methodological individualism is employed as an axiom underpinning free-market ideology. As such it will be claimed as self-evident even though to anyone not already conditioned to accept the axiom this seems blatantly ridiculous. The claim of trivial truth is in effect a blocking mechanism. Someone who questions the axiom must have a screw loose. Or in a more theological metaphor, ought to be shunned by the orthodox economic congregation. absolutely right! I have another question, though. In economics, what uses does meth. individualism have in the actual attempt to understand the world (that is, beyond mere ideology)? I can think of two so far: 1) the free rider or collective action problem: it's really hard for a group of people to attain collective goals because some will be in it for themselves. 2) the representative agent model, in which macroeconomists lazily believe that looking at the effects of individual constraints and incentives tell us how aggregates of people behave. -- Jim Devine / The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best. -- Will Rogers
[PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
A CounterPunch Special Report on the Economy In Richistan: Fantastic Wealth for a Few; Steady Decline for Many The Return of the Robber Barons By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS The US economy continues its 21st century decline, even as the Bush Regime outfits B-2 stealth bombers with 30,000 pound monster “bunker buster” bombs for its coming attack on Iran. While profits soar for the armaments industry, the American people continue to take it on the chin. The latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the real wages and salaries of US civilian workers are below those of 5 years ago. It could not be otherwise with US corporations offshoring good jobs in order to reduce labor costs and, thereby, to convert wages once paid to Americans into multi-million dollar bonuses paid to CEOs and other top management. Good jobs that still remain in the US are increasingly filled with foreign workers brought in on work visas. Corporate public relations departments have successfully spread the lie that there is a shortage of qualified US workers, necessitating the importation into the US of foreigners. The truth is that the US corporations force their American employees to train the lower paid foreigners who take their jobs. Otherwise, the discharged American gets no severance pay. Law firms, such as Cohen Grigsby, compete in marketing their services to US corporations on how to evade the law and to replace their American employees with lower paid foreigners. As Lawrence Lebowitz, vice president at Cohen Grisby, explained in the law firm’s marketing video, “our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested US worker.” Meanwhile, US colleges and universities continue to graduate hundreds of thousands of qualified engineers, IT professionals, and other professionals who will never have the opportunity to work in the professions for which they have been trained. America today is like India of yesteryear, with engineers working as bartenders, taxi cab drivers, waitresses, and employed in menial work in dog kennels as the offshoring of US jobs dismantles the ladders of upward mobility for US citizens. Over the last year (from June 2006 through June 2007) the US economy created 1.6 million net private sector jobs. As Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services reports each month, essentially all of the new jobs are in low-paid domestic services that do not require a college education. The category, “Leisure and hospitality,” accounts for 30 per cent of the new jobs, of which 387,000 are bartenders and waitresses, 38,000 are workers in motels and hotels, and 50,000 are employed in entertainment and recreation. The category, “Education and health services,” accounts for 35 per cent of the gain in employment, of which 100,000 are in educational services and 456,000 are in health care and social assistance, principally ambulatory health care services and hospitals. “Professional and technical services” accounts for 268,000 of the new jobs. “ Finance and insurance” added 93,000 new jobs, of which about one quarter are in real estate and about one half are in insurance. “Transportation and warehousing” added 65,000 jobs, and wholesale and retail trade added 185,000. Over the entire year, the US economy created merely 51,000 jobs in architectural and engineering services, less than the 76,000 jobs created in management and technical consulting (essentially laid-off white collar professionals). Except for a well-connected few graduates, who find their way into Wall Street investment banks, top law firms, and private medical practice, American universities today consist of detention centers to delay for four or five years the entry of American youth into unskilled domestic services. Meanwhile the rich are getting much richer and luxuriating in the most fantastic conspicuous consumption since the Gilded Age. Robert Frank has dubbed the new American world of the super-rich “Richistan.” In Richistan there is a two-year waiting list for $50 million 200-foot yachts. In Richistan Rolex watches are considered Wal-Mart junk. Richistanians sport $736,000 Franck Muller timepieces, sign their names with $700,000 Mont Blanc jewel-encrusted pens. Their valets, butlers (with $100,000 salaries), and bodyguards carry the $42,000 Louis Vuitton handbags of wives and mistresses. Richistanians join clubs open only to those with $100 million, pay $650,000 for golf club memberships, eat $50 hamburgers and $1,000 omelettes, drink $90 a bottle Bling mineral water and down $10,000 “martinis on a rock” (gin or vodka poured over a diamond) at New York’s Algonquin Hotel. Who are the Richistanians? They are CEOs who have moved their companies abroad and converted the wages they formerly paid Americans into $100 million compensation packages for themselves. They are investment bankers and hedge fund managers, who created the subprime mortgage derivatives that
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
We need some evidence for the following: Meanwhile, US colleges and universities continue to graduate hundreds of thousands of qualified engineers, IT professionals, and other professionals who will never have the opportunity to work in the professions for which they have been trained. America today is like India of yesteryear, with engineers working as bartenders, taxi cab drivers, waitresses, and employed in menial work in dog kennels as the offshoring of US jobs dismantles the ladders of upward mobility for US citizens. Anthony P. D'Costa, Professor Currently Comparative International Development Senior Visiting Research Fellow University of WashingtonAsia Research Institute 1900 Commerce StreetNational University of Singapore Tacoma, WA 98402, USA 469 A Tower Block Phone: (253) 692-4462 Bukit Timah Road #10-01 Fax : (253) 692-5718 Singapore 259770 http://tinyurl.com/yhjzrm Ph: (65) 6516 8785 xx On Thu, 2 Aug 2007, Brian McKenna wrote: A CounterPunch Special Report on the Economy In Richistan: Fantastic Wealth for a Few; Steady Decline for Many The Return of the Robber Barons By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS The US economy continues its 21st century decline, even as the Bush Regime outfits B-2 stealth bombers with 30,000 pound monster “bunker buster” bombs for its coming attack on Iran. While profits soar for the armaments industry, the American people continue to take it on the chin. The latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the real wages and salaries of US civilian workers are below those of 5 years ago. It could not be otherwise with US corporations offshoring good jobs in order to reduce labor costs and, thereby, to convert wages once paid to Americans into multi-million dollar bonuses paid to CEOs and other top management. Good jobs that still remain in the US are increasingly filled with foreign workers brought in on work visas. Corporate public relations departments have successfully spread the lie that there is a shortage of qualified US workers, necessitating the importation into the US of foreigners. The truth is that the US corporations force their American employees to train the lower paid foreigners who take their jobs. Otherwise, the discharged American gets no severance pay. Law firms, such as Cohen Grigsby, compete in marketing their services to US corporations on how to evade the law and to replace their American employees with lower paid foreigners. As Lawrence Lebowitz, vice president at Cohen Grisby, explained in the law firm’s marketing video, “our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested US worker.” Meanwhile, US colleges and universities continue to graduate hundreds of thousands of qualified engineers, IT professionals, and other professionals who will never have the opportunity to work in the professions for which they have been trained. America today is like India of yesteryear, with engineers working as bartenders, taxi cab drivers, waitresses, and employed in menial work in dog kennels as the offshoring of US jobs dismantles the ladders of upward mobility for US citizens. Over the last year (from June 2006 through June 2007) the US economy created 1.6 million net private sector jobs. As Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services reports each month, essentially all of the new jobs are in low-paid domestic services that do not require a college education. The category, “Leisure and hospitality,” accounts for 30 per cent of the new jobs, of which 387,000 are bartenders and waitresses, 38,000 are workers in motels and hotels, and 50,000 are employed in entertainment and recreation. The category, “Education and health services,” accounts for 35 per cent of the gain in employment, of which 100,000 are in educational services and 456,000 are in health care and social assistance, principally ambulatory health care services and hospitals. “Professional and technical services” accounts for 268,000 of the new jobs. “ Finance and insurance” added 93,000 new jobs, of which about one quarter are in real estate and about one half are in insurance. “Transportation and warehousing” added 65,000 jobs, and wholesale and retail trade added 185,000. Over the entire year, the US economy created merely 51,000 jobs in architectural and engineering services, less than the 76,000 jobs created in management and technical consulting (essentially laid-off white collar professionals). Except for a well-connected few graduates, who find their way into Wall Street investment banks, top law firms, and private medical practice, American universities today consist of detention centers to delay for four or five years the entry of American youth into unskilled domestic services.
[PEN-L] query: Murdoch and Maxwell
thinking about Rupert's take-over of the WSJ makes me think of the late media baron, Robert Maxwell. The question is: how (over) leveraged is Murdoch? As far as I can tell, no-one is asking this question, which seems relevant if we're going to be seeing a recession in the near future. on Maxwell from the Wikipedia: Shortly before his death, at a time of high interest rates and during a deep recession, Maxwell had substantial borrowings secured on his shareholdings in his public companies, Mirror and Maxwell Communications. The banks were permitted to sell these holdings in certain circumstances, which they did, depressing the share price and reducing the coverage of the remaining debt. Maxwell then used more money, both borrowed and redirected from pension funds and even the daily balances of his businesses, to buy shares on the open market, in an attempt to prop up the price and provide the shares as collateral for further debt. In reality he was bailing a sinking ship. On November 5, 1991, at the age of 68, Maxwell is presumed to have fallen overboard from his luxury yacht, Lady Ghislaine, which was cruising off the Canary Islands, and his body was subsequently found floating in the Atlantic Ocean. He was buried in Jerusalem. The official verdict was accidental drowning, though some commentators have surmised that he may have committed suicide, and others that he was murdered. -- Jim Devine / The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best. -- Will Rogers
Re: [PEN-L] methodological individualism
Greetings Economists, On Aug 2, 2007, at 8:40 AM, Jim Devine wrote: 1) the free rider or collective action problem: it's really hard for a group of people to attain collective goals because some will be in it for themselves. Doyle; The model is language here. If a language is shared like English or Chinese (the big two languages) then what individuals do to play with language hardly matters in terms of the larger process of connecting so many at once. Words that arise anew come from common agreement in exchange. That is if you say shite (a neologism) I can or cannot use the same word. When people exchange then the stabilize in the group the 'meaning' of a word. Unless this is shared then we can't communicate. We can't as it were learn English and expect someone speaking only Chinese to understand us, or connect in a 'knowledge' base. This means that a cheater goes no where if the 'exchange' does not stabilize. JD writes; 2) the representative agent model, in which macroeconomists lazily believe that looking at the effects of individual constraints and incentives tell us how aggregates of people behave. Exchange implies network structure (in math, graph theory), so describing a network structure by reference to a point on a grid fails. Doyle
Re: [PEN-L] query: Murdoch and Maxwell
On 8/2/07, Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: He was certainly highly leveraged some time ago, when the business press speculated about his impending implosion. Would he have made the same mistake twice? the main reasons why capitalists get over-leveraged is because they anticipate really high returns, which will then allow them to handle their debts. (Murdoch's WSJ can support his efforts to create a new cable business news network, for example.) Part of this is _hubris_. I don't think it's possible to be a high-flying entrepreneur without it. -- Jim Devine / The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best. -- Will Rogers
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
On 8/2/07, Anthony D'Costa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We need some evidence for the following: Meanwhile, US colleges and universities continue to graduate hundreds of thousands of qualified engineers, IT professionals, and other professionals who will never have the opportunity to work in the professions for which they have been trained. America today is like India of yesteryear, with engineers working as bartenders, taxi cab drivers, waitresses, and employed in menial work in dog kennels as the offshoring of US jobs dismantles the ladders of upward mobility for US citizens. This article does a nice job of mixing anti-immigrant rhetoric with labor issues. The author conveniently forgets the fact that foreign workers brought in on work visas are concentrated in the few industries that actually have seen healthy wage growth such as technology and finance. If this is the quality of the articles on Counterpunch, you have to wonder what the conservative press is saying. Like: ---snip Good jobs that still remain in the US are increasingly filled with foreign workers brought in on work visas. Corporate public relations departments have successfully spread the lie that there is a shortage of qualified US workers, necessitating the importation into the US of foreigners. The truth is that the US corporations force their American employees to train the lower paid foreigners who take their jobs. Otherwise, the discharged American gets no severance pay. Law firms, such as Cohen Grigsby, compete in marketing their services to US corporations on how to evade the law and to replace their American employees with lower paid foreigners. As Lawrence Lebowitz, vice president at Cohen Grisby, explained in the law firm's marketing video, our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested US worker. -raghu.
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
On 8/2/07, Anthony D'Costa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We need some evidence for the following: Meanwhile, US colleges and universities continue to graduate hundreds of thousands of qualified engineers, IT professionals, and other professionals who will never have the opportunity to work in the professions for which they have been trained. America today is like India of yesteryear, with engineers working as bartenders, taxi cab drivers, waitresses, and employed in menial work in dog kennels as the offshoring of US jobs dismantles the ladders of upward mobility for US citizens. Empirical data? Or perhaps a highly paid job collecting crunching the numbers to prove it to the rest of the number crunchers? Those jobs, proving what everybody can plainly see, are in high demand. My observations tell me Roberts is right, but there's an important part of the story missing. Their own narcissistic/greed-driven beliefs that American society owes them a Rolex and a Maserati, but doesn't owe a janitor a place to live. My cousin... with his graduates degree in environmental sciences works at an Ace Hardware in Raleigh-Durham NC and whines, while my father pays his ARM mortgage so his sister, who lives with my cousin doesn't end up in a nursing home, and I've watched as a generation of college grads with computer degrees (you can train a welfare mother to do most of what they do in vocational schools,) who used to work on 'servers' now work AS servers [in restaurants bars] locally. One thing I see in in common... They expected much too much from American society. Weren't THEY American 'exceptionals'! NOT! I don't feel sorry for the professional bourgeoisie at all. For the most part, their expectations led to their own problems, psychological, sociological, and financial. Suckers... born every minute, and two to stomp on them, scrambling to the top of the dung heap. Leigh Anthony P. D'Costa, Professor Currently Comparative International Development Senior Visiting Research Fellow University of WashingtonAsia Research Institute 1900 Commerce StreetNational University of Singapore Tacoma, WA 98402, USA 469 A Tower Block Phone: (253) 692-4462 Bukit Timah Road #10-01 Fax : (253) 692-5718 Singapore 259770 http://tinyurl.com/yhjzrm Ph: (65) 6516 8785 xx On Thu, 2 Aug 2007, Brian McKenna wrote: A CounterPunch Special Report on the Economy In Richistan: Fantastic Wealth for a Few; Steady Decline for Many The Return of the Robber Barons By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS The US economy continues its 21st century decline, even as the Bush Regime outfits B-2 stealth bombers with 30,000 pound monster bunker buster bombs for its coming attack on Iran. While profits soar for the armaments industry, the American people continue to take it on the chin. The latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the real wages and salaries of US civilian workers are below those of 5 years ago. It could not be otherwise with US corporations offshoring good jobs in order to reduce labor costs and, thereby, to convert wages once paid to Americans into multi-million dollar bonuses paid to CEOs and other top management. Good jobs that still remain in the US are increasingly filled with foreign workers brought in on work visas. Corporate public relations departments have successfully spread the lie that there is a shortage of qualified US workers, necessitating the importation into the US of foreigners. The truth is that the US corporations force their American employees to train the lower paid foreigners who take their jobs. Otherwise, the discharged American gets no severance pay. Law firms, such as Cohen Grigsby, compete in marketing their services to US corporations on how to evade the law and to replace their American employees with lower paid foreigners. As Lawrence Lebowitz, vice president at Cohen Grisby, explained in the law firm's marketing video, our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested US worker. Meanwhile, US colleges and universities continue to graduate hundreds of thousands of qualified engineers, IT professionals, and other professionals who will never have the opportunity to work in the professions for which they have been trained. America today is like India of yesteryear, with engineers working as bartenders, taxi cab drivers, waitresses, and employed in menial work in dog kennels as the offshoring of US jobs dismantles the ladders of upward mobility for US citizens. Over the last year (from June 2006 through June 2007) the US economy created 1.6 million net private sector jobs. As Charles McMillion of MBG
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
The Buffalo In Da' Midst wrote: I don't feel sorry for the professional bourgeoisie at all. For the most part, their expectations led to their own problems, psychological, sociological, and financial. This belief should make the capitalists happy, since it guarantees disunity in the working class. Carrol
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
On 8/2/07, Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Buffalo In Da' Midst wrote: I don't feel sorry for the professional bourgeoisie at all. For the most part, their expectations led to their own problems, psychological, sociological, and financial. This belief should make the capitalists happy, since it guarantees disunity in the working class. Carrol Let me know when they think of themselves, and act as, 'working class'. Until then, they are part of the pollution... NOT part of the solution. Confronting these people with the fact they've made their nest and now they have to sit in it, and offering solutions (Does the 'left' have one?) is commonly called 'activism'. Leigh
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
On 8/2/07, Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This belief should make the capitalists happy, since it guarantees disunity in the working class. Carrol Are foreigners on work visas part of the working class? Does setting domestic workers against foreigners not guarantee disunity in the working class? -raghu.
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
On 8/2/07, raghu [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are foreigners on work visas part of the working class? Does setting domestic workers against foreigners not guarantee disunity in the working class? -raghu. I consider foreign workers on H1b (and other types of) visa as 'self-exploited' bourgeoisie. They tolerate their own exploitation for personal gain. Now, look up the word opportunist. A Guatemalan janitor, who can't get get a visa even though most Americans won't do his/her job is working class. I would rewrite the IWW charter to fit the 'information age': The working class and the so-called 'professional' class have absolutely nothing in common. overposted Leigh
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
Lou Dobbs -- I mean Paul Craig Roberts -- writes that: Another deceit is the measure called core inflation. This measure of inflation excludes food and energy, two large components of the average family's budget. Wall Street and corporations and, therefore, the media emphasize core inflation, because it holds down cost of living increases and interest rates. In the second quarter of this year, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a more complete measure of inflation, increased at an annual rate of 5.2 per cent compared to 2.3 per cent for core inflation. this is crap. No serious economist believes that the core inflation rate is an actual measure of the inflation rate. Rather, it's supposed to be a measure of that part of the actual inflation that is most likely to persist in the future. It's being used as a way of predicting future inflation. An examination of how inflation is measured quickly reveals the games played to deceive the American people. Housing prices are not in the index. Instead, the rental rate of housing is used as a proxy for housing prices. it would be stupid to count the purchase price of a house as part of the CPI. Nobody buys a new house every month. Instead, we pay for the services provided by the house during the month, which is a much smaller number. I'm sure that the government doesn't measure the latter well, but at least they are aware of the problem. In fact, Mr. Roberts (where are those strawberries, by the way?) would find that his view that actual inflation is higher than it's measured totally undermined if the CPI were measured in the way he wants. This is because the housing crunch would likely cause deflation in the measured inflation rate -- Jim Devine / The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best. -- Will Rogers
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
On 8/2/07, The Buffalo In Da' Midst [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I consider foreign workers on H1b (and other types of) visa as 'self-exploited' bourgeoisie. They tolerate their own exploitation for personal gain. Now, look up the word opportunist. Perhaps. But you have to remember most of them are merely trading in one form of exploitation (as a visa worker) for a far more insidious kind (unemployed in the third world). While on this subject I also want to point out some myths about visa workers. 1) Workers on visas only have their jobs because they accept low salaries. Lou Dobbs won't stop hammering this but it is simply not true. The big tech, pharma and finance multinationals who are the biggest users of work visas pay their foreign workers the same as the domestic ones, as they are required to by law. Any savings on labor costs would be too miniscule compared to legal risks and morale problems. There are some small IT consultancies who underpay their workers, but that is a very small part. 2) Foreign workers take jobs away from qualified Americans. Another Lou Dobbs favorite, but once again completely false. The tech companies happen to be right on this point - there really is a shortage of qualified workers in engineering and computers. Except for a brief spell of high unemployment in 2001-2002 it has always been this way since at least the 90's. Most companies very much prefer local workers when they can find them - see what happened to visas in the 2001-2002 timeframe. To be sure domestic jobs are being replaced by imports from China and outsourcing to India. But this has nothing to do with workers on visas. Any labor movement that includes highly paid domestic professionals in the tech industry, but excludes visa workers loses most of its moral force and becomes nothing more than a special-interest lobbying group. -raghu.
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
raghu wrote: On 8/2/07, Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This belief should make the capitalists happy, since it guarantees disunity in the working class. Carrol Are foreigners on work visas part of the working class? Does setting domestic workers against foreigners not guarantee disunity in the working class? Yes. That too. Actually, I think moralism of one form or another is at the root of all the divisions within the working class. A classic case. Many years ago I had a lengthy conversation with a freshman student on the subject of welfare cheaters. I convinced her that welfare cheaters were a minor problem; I convinced her that whatever hurt welfare hurt all workers; I convinced her that hunting down welfare cheaters wasted rather than saved resources. I convinced her that in practice the hunt for welfare cheaters caused immense difficulties for those in need who were not cheaters. She agreed to all of this -- but still thought it wasn't right to let cheaters get away with it. The criticism of high-paid workers (who ARE working-class, not part of the bourgeosie) introduces a moralistic element into thinking about class. That is disastrous. Higher wages for already high-pay workers DOES NOT effect in any way the wages or benefits of poorly paid workers. It corrupts consciousness to say or hint that it does. Carrol -raghu.
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
Leigh: Let me know when they think of themselves, and act as, 'working class'. Whether they think of themselves as working class is another issue. But they act as working class because they are working class. Working class does not always act to the liking of the progressives. Best, Sabri Take the Internet to Go: Yahoo!Go puts the Internet in your pocket: mail, news, photos more. http://mobile.yahoo.com/go?refer=1GNXIC
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
On 8/2/07, Sabri Oncu [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Leigh: Let me know when they think of themselves, and act as, 'working class'. Sabri: Whether they think of themselves as working class is another issue. But they act as working class because they are working class. Working class does not always act to the liking of the progressives. this question seems even older than the hills. Althusser and his followers defined the working class as a position within the class system, as those lacking ownership of the means of production and thus forced to work for others to survive. (nuances ignored.) On the other hand, E.P. Thompson emphasized the working class as sharing consciousness of their class position and shared interests, while their own having organizations. (again, nuances ignored.) But of course, Marx knew about both sides of this debate: he distinguished between a class in itself (a structural position) and a class for itself (organized and class-conscious). He started the development of the theory of how the former can become the latter, and how we can speed up the process. Maybe that theory isn't as good as it should be, but the in itself vs. for itself distinction can clarify our thinking. by the way, let me know when hippies think of themselves, and act as, 'hippies'. No, they often act like hippies. But sometimes they think they aren't hippies. -- Jim Devine / The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best. -- Will Rogers
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
On 8/2/07, Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The criticism of high-paid workers (who ARE working-class, not part of the bourgeosie) introduces a moralistic element into thinking about class. That is disastrous. Higher wages for already high-pay workers DOES NOT effect in any way the wages or benefits of poorly paid workers. It corrupts consciousness to say or hint that it does. Carrol I am curious about your categories: do you consider management to be part of the working class? An an extreme case, what about upper management, who arguably belong to both the working class (salaried) and the capitalist class (stock options)? It seems to me that there is a considerable gray area between the proletariat and the bourgeosie. -raghu.
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
As I recall, the index shifted to rents when housing prices were rising [during the Reagan Admin?] much faster than rents. It was intended to lower the CPI [perhaps when Roberts was in the Treasury Department] If homeowners make up a majority of the populations, annual payments might make some sense, but much of that would already be picked up as interest. Jim's point on rents is probably correct, but it is not as cut and dry as he makes it sound. On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 11:09:43AM -0700, Jim Devine wrote: it would be stupid to count the purchase price of a house as part of the CPI. Nobody buys a new house every month. Instead, we pay for the services provided by the house during the month, which is a much smaller number. I'm sure that the government doesn't measure the latter well, but at least they are aware of the problem. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
Marvin Gandall wrote: By the way, downward or upward pressures on pay and benefits on one group of workers do tend to affect other groups. Workers, especially union members, habitually compare their pay movements to others in their workplace and industry, and employers are required to pay attention to maintaining pay relativities as a means of retaining and recruiting labour, the demand for each occupational group being roughly equal. So when high-paid workers do receive higher wages, to use your example, it does stimulate the demand for matching increases lower down, and the possibilities for obtaining these. I agree. I was hasty in my in any way. I imagine it is contingent whether at a given time and place general wages are most affected by this or the other sector of the class. But the conditions of all the workers (including the most 'favored') of the class are certainly inter-related -- and An injury to one is an injury to all is a simple empirical fact not merely or at all a moral injunction. Carrol
[PEN-L] query: methodological individualism
I'm reposting this, hoping for an answer. In economics, what uses does methodological individualism have in the actual attempt to understand the world (that is, beyond mere ideology)? I can think of two so far: 1) the free rider or collective action problem: it's really hard for a group of people to attain collective goals because some will be in it for themselves. 2) the representative agent model, in which macroeconomists lazily believe that looking at the effects of individual constraints and incentives tell us how aggregates of people behave. thanks ahead of time. -- Jim Devine / The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best. -- Will Rogers
Re: [PEN-L] Does Roberts Get it Right?
Carrol wrote: Borderline cases tend to corrupt analysis. Management (as I would describe it) is simply part of the capitalist class, their share of surplus value coming to them in the form of salaries. But Management is also a rubber-bag category that can be stretched weirdly. According to a Supreme Court case faculty at private schools are part of management and therefore not protected by labor law. The essential thing is to see that class is first and last a relationship, not a tin can into which one sorts red marbles, green marbles, red/green/purple marbles, etc. === It is possible to be a little more precise. Top managers rely as much on their options and other investments as on their board-determined salaries to maintain their income and have more autonomy and effective decision-making authority in the staffing and operations of the workplace. The great majority of managerial and professional employees are generally grouped together in management-determined classification and pay bands, enjoy less autonomy, and lack effective control over staffing and operations. Labour legislation in many jurisdictions accounts for these distinctions in determining which professionals - generally referring to those with university degrees - are to be classed as employees rather than management and, hence, eligible for union membership. It's a grey area, as you note, around which there is a large body of labour jurisprudence. As you might expect, the Europeans and former British colonies, with their labour and social-democratic tradition, are far in advance of the Americans in extending bargaining rights to this fast growing more highly educated and better-paid strata of the workforce.
[PEN-L] Pelosi and Conyers
Rumors circulating in the Washington beltway have it that Reps. Conyers and Pelosi are keeping impeachment off the table because they have semen-stained blue dresses in their closets.
[PEN-L] bridge neglect
When Clinton ran for president, he promised a $19 billion program to fix the nation's infrastructure. Financial markets nailed him he backed off as fast as you can say single payer. Now, the stock market is supposedly licking its collective chops hungering after an infrastructure boondoggle. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com
[PEN-L] Funds that shake capitalist logic By Lawrence Summers
Here below is additional proof that Patanaik's point that global imbalances will not be refressed by exchange rate tinkering but the crisis will come when foreigners seek national assets in the US Funds that shake capitalist logic By Lawrence Summers Financial Times July 29 2007 17:49 For some time now, the large flow of capital from the developing to the industrialised world has been the principal irony of the international financial system. In 2007 this flow will total well over half a trillion dollars, a figure that will be comfortably exceeded by the build-up in reserves and sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) in developing countries. Indeed, Morgan Stanley has estimated on reasonable assumptions that there is now close to $2,500bn (￡1,200bn, €1,800bn) in SWFs and that this figure will increase to $5,000bn by 2010 and $12,000bn by 2015. Inevitably, and appropriately, countries possessed of publicly held foreign assets far in excess of anything needed to respond to financial contingencies feel pressure to deploy them strategically or at least to earn higher returns than those available in US Treasury bills or their foreign equivalents. Even without this pressure, SWFs are now growing at a faster pace than the global rate of new issuance of traditional reserve assets. There is plenty of room for debate over how large these funds should become. (Does China really need a saving rate in excess of 50 per cent that all but forces hundreds of billions of dollars in reserve growth?) But on any plausible path over the next few years, a crucial question for the global financial system and indeed for the global economy is how these funds will be invested. The question is profound and goes to the nature of global capitalism. A signal event of the past quarter-century has been the sharp decline in the extent of direct state ownership of business as the private sector has taken ownership of what were once government-owned companies. Yet governments are now accumulating various kinds of stakes in what were once purely private companies through their cross-border investment activities. In the last month we have seen government-controlled Chinese entities take the largest external stake (albeit non-voting) in Blackstone, a big private equity group that, indirectly through its holdings, is one of the largest employers in the US. The government of Qatar is seeking to gain control of J.?Sainsbury, one of Britain’s largest supermarket chains. Gazprom, a Russian conglomerate in effect controlled by the Kremlin, has strategic interests in the energy sectors of a number of countries and even a stake in Airbus. Entities controlled by the governments of China and Singapore are offering to take a substantial stake in Barclays, giving it more heft in its effort to pull off the world’s largest banking merger, with ABN Amro. To date most of the official commentary on the issue of SWFs has been framed in terms of traditional arguments about cross-border capital flows. US and UK officials have raised -concerns that focus only on the desirability of reciprocity and transparency and on how to treat sectors that trigger national security questions. Others, particularly in -continental Europe, have been less positive and have emphasised nationalist considerations about the benefits of local ownership and control. What has received less attention are the particular risks associated with ownership by government-controlled entities, particularly where the ownership stake is taken through direct investments. The logic of the capitalist system depends on shareholders causing companies to act so as to maximise the value of their shares. It is far from obvious that this will over time be the only motivation of governments as shareholders. They may want to see their national companies compete effectively, or to extract technology or to achieve influence. We have seen the degree of concern over News Corp’s attempt to buy The Wall Street Journal. How differently should one feel about a direct investment stake of a foreign government in a media or publishing company? Apart from the question of what foreign stakes would mean for companies, there is the additional question of what they might mean for host governments. What about the day when a country joins some “coalition of the willing” and asks the US president to support a tax break for a company in which it has invested? Or when a decision has to be made about whether to bail out a company, much of whose debt is held by an ally’s central bank? All of these risks would be greatly mitigated if SWFs invested through intermediary asset managers, as is the case with most institutional pools of capital such as endowments and pension funds. The experience of many endowments and pension funds suggests that this approach is in most cases likely to produce the best risk-adjusted returns. To the extent that SWFs pursue
