Greider's managed trade hypothesis
I'm using Greider's ONE WORLD, READY OR NOT in an interdisciplinary freshman seminar. This is my first reading of the book--so far I generally like it, with reservations. One question I have concerns Greider's take on the existing international trade regime. In chapter 7 he argues that the world trading system does not function in reality the way it is ususally described. In general, he says, trade flows are not market-driven but politically managed. He seems to lean heavily on Lawrence Krause, an IR prof at UCSD, who claims that more than half of all trade is managed in one form or another. In the Greider-Krause world, countries (E. Asia, Australia, the US, and Europe) barter market access for investment, local content, and countertrade quids (?) pro quo. This in turn is said to be responsible for a portion of the excess capacity in global markets, since these political deals are less responsive to demand constraints than purely market-driven decisions would be--although Greider makes it clear he believes demand problems are endemic to capitalism. My question is, how justified is Greider's view of managed trade in the existing system? Is it a small piece of the total or a large, even determining piece? Is the WTO just a sham, as he claims it is? Who else has written on this topic? By the way, in case anyone is interested, I have produced a short (2 page) handout to explain Greider's position on oversupply--basically a very simplified rendering of standard post-keynesianism. It is written for students with little economics background, but it assumes loose familiarity with supply and demand diagrams. Since it uses a graphic it can't be included in e-mail but must be sent as an attachment. It's formatted in WordPerfect 8.0. If anyone wants it, they can e-mail me (not the list!) and I'll pass it along. Peter Dorman
Class Warfare in the Information Age
Michael Perelman's new book, Class Warfare in the Information Age has come to hand. It fills an important need as a corrective to the now almost universal Net-hype. Net-hype ranges a broad spectrum from the pompous (and often vacuous) theorising of Manuel Castells (Tony Blair's favourite philosopher) -- to the Wired hysterias of Kevin Kelly -- to the imbecile moral panics (net-crime, net-gambling, net-pedophilia, net-surveillance) which the mass media manage to mix with uncritical enthusiasm (the Net as the future of post-human, genetically-enhanced humankind, immortalised in virtual worlds; the Net as improbable panacea for Third World poverty; the Net facilitating Athenian-style direct democracy; the future as a permabulation through virtual malls, etc.) Net-hype even extends to Net-Insurrectionaries, Harry Cleaver's espousal of sub-comandante's virtual Zap revolution being a prime example. All this hype needed a god debunking. So it is useful to be reminded, as Perelman does, that 'the reality of the information age falls considerably short of the futuristic vision of the information age. In fact, the imaginary dystopias of science fiction seem to be closer to the truth than the fantasies of the champions of the coming information age.' His critique does not stop there. There has been much recent research to suggest that informatics has not exactly been the productivity boon the corporations had expected. Nor has labour fared any better: the much-heralded workless society has coincided with speed-up, longer hours, casualisation and the three-job anti-social family. So what is going on? What's behind the hype? Perelman wants 'to make sense of this welter of conflicting claims and accusations in the context of the information revolution.' His conclusions: that the information revolution is 'overblown', that in any case we are not educating people to make sense of it, that most new employment is not connected with it, and that its most useful attribute is to perfect capitalism's command and control. According to Perelman, what informatics really creates is the Panopticon society, after Bentham's notion of the perfect prison. The real subordination of labour to capital is the true name of the game, even when it comes at the expense of the massive glitches and crashes which the emphasis on command-and-control instead of decentred networking often entails. A major theme of Perelman's book is the privatisation of society's knowledge-base which, like DNA and even the carbon in the atmosphere, is one of the last great commons capitalism has left to enclose. What the information age will bring may actually be a lack of information. Knowledge will still be power, and access to it will be strictly controlled. Information will be commoditised, regulated and rendered much less accessible. All this will surely be true to some degree, despite the generalised promise of the Net and of things like Project Gutenberg. Yes, it will bring an ocean of culture, books, art, knowledge and as bandwidth grows, moving images, into everyone's lives, as television once did and movable type before that. But the apparent plethora will conceal a drastic diminution of opportunity, a reduction in the democracy of knowledge which robber barons like Dale Carnegie once tried to extend to the masses. The really important things will be more inaccessible than ever, shut away behind strong cryptography, archived on orbital satellites beyond the ken of governments. Class Warfare in the Information Age is more extended essay that kilometric, Castells-style exposition. It is portable. But as a tour d'horizon it's as good as they come. Perelman's strength is that his overview is historical as well as social. Frances Yates' great book, The Art of Memory, described how the invention of alphabets and writing in antiquity, displaced an attribute of civilised discourse which had taken generations to develop. It thereby privileged the masses against the leisured class which had time to develop such skills, expressed in phenomenal memory-feats by poets and orators from Homer to Cicero -- and even Shakespeare. Non-coincidentally, these were mostly cultural conservatives. Perelman reminds of this but his conclusion is not the obvious one that the Information Age presents similar subversive possibilities to writing. Conservatives from Plato to TS Eliot were fearful of the consequences of massifying knowledge, objectifying it and making it available to the unscrupulous masses. According to Perelman, they would be less fearful of the 'information revolution' which may have the opposite effect, making knowledge (as opposed to information) less accessible, reinforcing authority and hierarchy. The meat of Perelman's extended essay is his discussion of corporate strategies for privatising the gold in people's minds. Quoting Kenneth Arrow: 'embedded information... [as] capital depends on slow mobility of information-rich labor', he
Re: Griliches Poverty
In a message dated 98-03-19 11:52:19 EST, you write: Eh? Where'd this happen? Which Fed economist, where? Latest issue of the "Journal of Economic Perspectives." jason
further progress in econonmics
"A Microeconomic Analysis of Slavery in Comparison to Free Labor Economies" BY: HALUK I. ERGIN Bilkent University SERDAR SAYAN Bilkent University SSRN ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT DELIVERY: http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=62685 Paper ID: Bilkent University Dept. of Economics WP 97-08 Date: July 1997 Contact: Serdar Sayan E-Mail: MAILTO:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Postal: Bilkent University, Department of Economics, 06533 Ankara, Turkey Phone:+90(312)266-4000 Ext. 2071 Fax: +90(312)266-5140 Co-Auth: MAILTO:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ERN Ref: LABOR:WPS98-118 In addition to supervision costs, the labor cost of an enterprise (plantation) in the system of slavery consists of the cost of acquiring the slaves and the subsistence compensation given out to the slaves. In this paper, we leave aside the issue of supervision costs previously taken up in the theoretical literature on slavery and focus on these two peculiar components of labor costs. We analyze the implications of this cost structure on the levels of profitability, efficiency and determination of equilibrium wages, and compare them to systems with free labor markets, along a continuum of demand-side Cournotic competition. For this purpose, we first use a model characterized by a decreasing returns to scale technology and show, parallel to the findings of Vedder, et. al. (1990), that the equilibrium subsistence wage in the system of slavery is strictly lower than the marginal product of labor. We then extend the model, given the same technology and preferences, to free labor markets covering possibilities ranging from monopsony to perfect competition in the limit and obtain a second and perhaps more striking result: Differently from equilibria in imperfectly competitive free labor markets, slavery and perfect competition equilibria are Pareto optimal. Furthermore, our comparisons across labor market scenarios suggest that the resistance of slaveholders to the abolishment of slavery is directly related to the expected level of demand-side competition in the free labor market which would replace slavery. Finally, we show that the conclusions derived from our analysis would remain generally valid under a constant returns to scale technology as well. JEL Classification: N31, J31, P51, J42, L13
Re: Section 7(a)
Paul asked why the state should be frightened. he said (we're talking 1932 and early 1993, I guess) Capitalism was discredited at the time. The whole class configuration had shifted. The state certainly could not blame the economic disorder on the unions at the time. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 916-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[Fwd: Crime and Punishment 1999 (fwd)]
Sid Shniad wrote: H. Bruce Franklin review in the Guardian Weekly: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN AMERICA By Elliott Currie Holt/Metropolitan. 230pp. US$23 THIS IS a very unfashionable book. Elliott Currie does not believe that we need to build more and more prisons, impose longer sentences, make prisons as harsh as possible, eliminate educational opportunities for prisoners, reinstitute chain gangs, treat juvenile offenders as adults, and divert still more funds from social services to penal institutions. He clings to the old-fashioned notion that we should concentrate more on the prevention of crime. He even goes so far as to accept the hopelessly outdated idea that widespread poverty is the main cause of violent crime. If all this were not antiquated enough, Currie also evidently assumes that rational argument based on scientific knowledge -- i.e. reason and facts -- can change social policy. Even his prose style is anachronistic: earnest, free of jargon, lucid. When Currie, who has taught sociology and criminology at Yale and Berkeley, advanced similar arguments in his 1985 volume Confronting Crime, the New York Times reviewer noted that the "biggest incarceration binge in merican history" had increased the nation's prison population from fewer than 200,000 in 1970 to 454,000 by 1984. What may have seemed an astonishing number of inmates back in 1984 is dwarfed by the current prison population of 1.2 million, plus an additional half-a-million people in local jails. The United States now has by far the largest prison system on the planet. There are more prisoners in California alone than in any other country in the world except China and Russia. The present U.S. rate of incarceration is six times the global average, seven times that of Europe, 14 times that of Japan, 23 times that of India. European rates of incarceration are consistently well below 100 per 100,000 population; the rate of incarceration of African-American males is close to 4,000 per 100,000. As Currie puts it in the present volume, "mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time," and we have thus been conducting a gigantic social "experiment," "testing the degree to which a modern industrial society can maintain public order through the threat of punishment." Has this experiment worked? Media attention has recently highlighted the falling rate of crime for the past four years. As Currie demonstrates, this decline has come during a period of unusually low unemployment and relative prosperity, actually bolstering his thesis that extreme poverty is the main cause of crime. Moreover, he notes that the crime rate has been falling only in relation to the extremely high levels of 1990-93. If we compare 1996 with 1984, the year cited in the review of Currie's earlier volume, we discover that the crime rate (according to the FBI's annual Crime Index) has actually risen 13 percent. The costs of this social experiment are immense. As Currie points out, the money spent on prisons has been "taken from the parts of the public sector that educate, train, socialize, treat, nurture, and house the population -- particularly the children of the poor." Currie if anything understates the consequences elsewhere in the public sector. For example, California now spends more on prisons than on higher education. Crime And Punishment In America cogently debunks what Currie labels the "myths" that rationalize and legitimize the prison craze. The "myth of leniency" (the prevailing notion that criminals are being let off too easily or let out too soon) is shown to be based on phony statistics, "unless we believe that . . . everyone convicted of an offense -- no matter how minor -- should be sent to jail or prison, and that all of those sent to prison should stay there for the rest of their lives." The "myth" that "prison works" ignores the soaring crime rates during most of the quarter-century of the incarceration experiment; it also assumes that the only alternative available to us has been doing nothing at all about crime. This leads to the parts of the book dearest to the author's heart: alternatives to mass incarceration. With thorough documentation from recent research, Currie describes a number of social programs that have indeed dramatically reduced rates of crime or recidivism, even among groups of people generally considered beyond hope. Examples he gives range from prenatal and preschool home visitation targeting child abuse through enriched schools for high-risk teenagers to successful community programs for youths who already have multiple arrests. The modest costs of these programs, together with their tangible benefits, offer a stark contrast to the enormously expensive mass incarceration model, with all its attendant
Re: Section 7(a)
There are a few sources for information on these events that have not so far been mentioned. James Gross (Cornell labor historian) has written a multi-volume history of the NLRA and NLRB. Jim Pope (Rutgers Law school) is currently doing an analysis of s.7(a). And related but slightly off topic: Daniel Ernst (Georgetown law / history) wrote Lawyers Against Labor about two years ago. It looks at influences on the drafting of the NLRA. Another who has written recently on this era include Thomas Kohler at Boston College Law School. Jack Getman (Texas Law School) has what should be a very interesting book coming out through Cornell called The Betrayal of Local 14 -- about the Paperworkers strike at Jay, Maine. Ellen J. Dannin California Western School of Law 225 Cedar Street San Diego, CA 92101 Phone: 619-525-1449 Fax:619-696-
Re: what's in a name?
To whom..., Mr. Sokolowski's post illustrates the misconception that socialism and a command economy are anything like the same animal. If socialism was a command economy, then it would be true that the difference between socialism and capitalism was a matter of degree. Therefore, Marxists can happily conclude that socialism is *not* characterized by the presence of a command economy. Instead, it is a question of ownership. When ownership is constituted in a capitalist way, we have capitalism. If ownership was ever to be constituted in a socialist way, we would have socialism. Fortunately for young socialists, ownership has never been constituted this way, and thus the putative "socialist" regimes of the past need not be a millstone around their necks. There, that ought to finish *that* debate. :) peace
RE: [Fwd: Crime and Punishment 1999 (fwd)]
Thank you for the reference Michael. I am organizing a long-term project roughly called "the economic causes and consequences of violence: a public health approach." The book will examine the public health issues of family and intimate partner violence, youth violence, and suicide, from a similar point of view. It will include sections on the economic causes (influences) of violence, the economic costs of violence, and the potential impact of violence prevention programs. I am currently working on narrower aspects of this subject, i.e., filling in the pieces. The criminal justice approach focuses on legally-defined crimal acts. The public health approach uses more of an episode-of-illness (or injury) classification. This can be a very important distinction (especially to Marxists) when you have categories of violence not defined as a crime. Jeff -- From: Michael Perelman To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Fwd: Crime and Punishment 1999 (fwd)] Date: Friday, March 20, 1998 12:02PM Sid Shniad wrote: H. Bruce Franklin review in the Guardian Weekly: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN AMERICA By Elliott Currie Holt/Metropolitan. 230pp. US$23 THIS IS a very unfashionable book. Elliott Currie does not believe that we need to build more and more prisons, impose longer sentences, make prisons as harsh as possible, eliminate educational opportunities for prisoners, reinstitute chain gangs, treat juvenile offenders as adults, and divert still more funds from social services to penal institutions. He clings to the old-fashioned notion that we should concentrate more on the prevention of crime. He even goes so far as to accept the hopelessly outdated idea that widespread poverty is the main cause of violent crime. If all this were not antiquated enough, Currie also evidently assumes that rational argument based on scientific knowledge -- i.e. reason and facts -- can change social policy. Even his prose style is anachronistic: earnest, free of jargon, lucid. When Currie, who has taught sociology and criminology at Yale and Berkeley, advanced similar arguments in his 1985 volume Confronting Crime, the New York Times reviewer noted that the "biggest incarceration binge in merican history" had increased the nation's prison population from fewer than 200,000 in 1970 to 454,000 by 1984. What may have seemed an astonishing number of inmates back in 1984 is dwarfed by the current prison population of 1.2 million, plus an additional half-a-million people in local jails. The United States now has by far the largest prison system on the planet. There are more prisoners in California alone than in any other country in the world except China and Russia. The present U.S. rate of incarceration is six times the global average, seven times that of Europe, 14 times that of Japan, 23 times that of India. European rates of incarceration are consistently well below 100 per 100,000 population; the rate of incarceration of African-American males is close to 4,000 per 100,000. As Currie puts it in the present volume, "mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time," and we have thus been conducting a gigantic social "experiment," "testing the degree to which a modern industrial society can maintain public order through the threat of punishment." Has this experiment worked? Media attention has recently highlighted the falling rate of crime for the past four years. As Currie demonstrates, this decline has come during a period of unusually low unemployment and relative prosperity, actually bolstering his thesis that extreme poverty is the main cause of crime. Moreover, he notes that the crime rate has been falling only in relation to the extremely high levels of 1990-93. If we compare 1996 with 1984, the year cited in the review of Currie's earlier volume, we discover that the crime rate (according to the FBI's annual Crime Index) has actually risen 13 percent. The costs of this social experiment are immense. As Currie points out, the money spent on prisons has been "taken from the parts of the public sector that educate, train, socialize, treat, nurture, and house the population -- particularly the children of the poor." Currie if anything understates the consequences elsewhere in the public sector. For example, California now spends more on prisons than on higher education. Crime And Punishment In America cogently debunks what Currie labels the "myths" that rationalize and legitimize the prison craze. The "myth of leniency" (the prevailing notion that criminals are being let off too easily or let out too soon) is shown to be based on phony statistics, "unless we believe that . . . everyone convicted of an offense -- no matter how minor -- should be sent to jail or prison, and that all of those sent to prison should stay there for the rest
Re: a proposed leading indicator -Reply
Tim Stroshane: How about the number of estimated homeless population per 1,000 resident population? Another indicator could perhaps include the percent of households in America paying 50 percent of their income in rent, then the percent of households at or below 50 percent of their regional median incomes who pay 50 percent of their incomes in rent. It would be interesting to gauge how the poor fair relative to the middle class in that regard, and over time. Related to this is the question of the number of people living in apartments, those who are not homeless but who are miserably crowded. The NY Times ran articles last year about the horrible problems facing Mexican and other immigrants who are crammed 10 to a one-bedroom apartment in sections of Queens or the Bronx. Contagious illnesses like TB, fires, and psychological stress make these places hell. Louis Proyect
Re: further progress in econonmics
At 11:40 AM 3/20/98 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote: "A Microeconomic Analysis of Slavery in Comparison to Free Labor Economies" ---snip Aside the econo-babble mumbo-jumbo, the argument is hardly original. Cf: Witold Kula, _An Economic Theory of the Feudal System_, London: NLB, 1976 who essentially argues that the profitablity of the fedual plantation (using Eastern European data) was obtained by the fact that the product was sold on competitive (Western) markets, wheres the Eastern institution of serfdom limited labour mobility resulting in its local oversupply, thus reducing its "marginal value" (as comparted to the market systems of Western Europe). To my knowledge, the original proponent of that argument in the 1930s was the Russian economist A.V. Chayanov (A Theory of Peasant Economy ? published in English by Wisconsin U Press if I remember correctly) who reached the same conslusion by analyzing emprical data from the tsarist Russia. The advantage of the cited approaches is that they are emprical science not an exercise in masturbatory... err mathematical abstraction. Regards, BY: HALUK I. ERGIN Bilkent University SERDAR SAYAN Bilkent University SSRN ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT DELIVERY: http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=62685 Paper ID: Bilkent University Dept. of Economics WP 97-08 Date: July 1997 Contact: Serdar Sayan E-Mail: MAILTO:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Postal: Bilkent University, Department of Economics, 06533 Ankara, Turkey Phone:+90(312)266-4000 Ext. 2071 Fax: +90(312)266-5140 Co-Auth: MAILTO:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ERN Ref: LABOR:WPS98-118 In addition to supervision costs, the labor cost of an enterprise (plantation) in the system of slavery consists of the cost of acquiring the slaves and the subsistence compensation given out to the slaves. In this paper, we leave aside the issue of supervision costs previously taken up in the theoretical literature on slavery and focus on these two peculiar components of labor costs. We analyze the implications of this cost structure on the levels of profitability, efficiency and determination of equilibrium wages, and compare them to systems with free labor markets, along a continuum of demand-side Cournotic competition. For this purpose, we first use a model characterized by a decreasing returns to scale technology and show, parallel to the findings of Vedder, et. al. (1990), that the equilibrium subsistence wage in the system of slavery is strictly lower than the marginal product of labor. We then extend the model, given the same technology and preferences, to free labor markets covering possibilities ranging from monopsony to perfect competition in the limit and obtain a second and perhaps more striking result: Differently from equilibria in imperfectly competitive free labor markets, slavery and perfect competition equilibria are Pareto optimal. Furthermore, our comparisons across labor market scenarios suggest that the resistance of slaveholders to the abolishment of slavery is directly related to the expected level of demand-side competition in the free labor market which would replace slavery. Finally, we show that the conclusions derived from our analysis would remain generally valid under a constant returns to scale technology as well. JEL Classification: N31, J31, P51, J42, L13 Wojtek Sokolowski Institute for Policy Studies Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233 Opinions expressed above are those of this writer only. They do not represent the views or policies of the Institute for Policy Studies, the Johns Hopkins University, or anyone else affiliated with these institutions.
Re: ASSA session cuts
The letter went to John J. Siegfried, Secretary of the AEA. He is at Vanderbilt University in the Economics Department. His email (that's how I sent mine) is [EMAIL PROTECTED] I'm sure he'll be overjoyed that I've handed it out, :-). This strikes me as being the time to make appeals, efforts, etc. They may have locked themselves in for this year, but maybe it can be cut back for the future. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 19 Mar 1998 21:11:45 -0500 Colin Danby [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Barkley: Great letter. Is there any value in having more of us unwashed types write in support? If so can you post a name and address to write to? Thanks, Colin PS If AEA is busily stifling us hets is there any good reason to remain a member? I could easily manage without my own copies of its ubiquitous ( iniquitous) journals. -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: a proposed leading indicator
Sperm counts. Doug Henwood wrote: Speaking of indicators, The Nation has asked me to put together a set of economic/social indicators, to be published quarterly, that would be revealing, interesting, and against the grain of conventional thinking. Any suggestions? Doug
Wall Street workers' paradise
Date: Sat, 17 Jan 1998 20:24:33 -0600 ... Newsgroups: alt.revolution.counter Subject: Capitalism under Vaclav Havel Here's a description of conditions under 'free market' capitalism in the Czech Republic, as created under the counter-revolutionary leadership of the celebrated Vaclav Havel: "Havel's 'democratic reforms' have brought cuts in health care, public housing, and education; and reductions in rent and fuel subsidies to low income people. The condition of labor has drastically declined. Sick leave, maternity leave, paid vacations, and other job benefits once taken for granted under communism have been cut or abolished. Worker sanitariums, vacation resorts, health clinics, sports and cultural centers, daycare centers, and other features that made communist enterprises more than just workplaces, have nearly vanished. Hospitals, libraries, houses of culture, and public transport systems are closing or services have drastically declined. Rest homes formerly reserved for workers have been privatized and redone as casinos, night clubs, and restaurants for the nouveaux riches. Real income has shrunk by as much as 30 percent under Havel's free market rule. More than one-third of citizens live in abject poverty and large numbers hold two or more jobs and work up to 14 hours a day. Those who have suffered the most are among the more vulnerable: women, children, the elderly, and ordinary workers and peasants. There is an upsurge in official corruption and organized crime, as well as in street crime, murder, homelessness, drug addiction, mental and physical illness, and suicide. Women are being recruited in unprecedented numbers for the booming sex industry that caters to foreign and domestic businessmen. Unable to find employment in their fields, many highly educated women go abroad to work as prostitutes. Children are also channeled into the sex market. 'Prague and Budapest now rival Bangkok and Manila as hubs for the collection of children to serve visiting pedophiles.' Oddly, the Prague police force today under Havel's free market "democracy" is many times larger than it was under the 'communist police state,' when 'relatively few police were needed.'" This is an excerpt from the article, "Vaclav Havel's Warm and Fuzzy Image," by Michael Parenti in COVERT ACTION QUARTERLY, Fall 1997, p. 47.
Re: what's in a name?
At 02:44 PM 3/20/98 -0500, Rakesh Bhandari wrote: Yes,it is one thing to study motion in a vacuum and then to determine the modification of motion by air pressure or viscosity. So Marx may have initially assumed a closed capitalist society, without foreign trade or vestigal or intermediate classes. Let us assume a closed national capitalist economy (which may not be Marx's assumption). If the current stock of machinery or inventories of such machinery has suffered moral depreciation, this may represent a destruction of value in an enclosed national capitalism. However if such morally depreciated machinery can be sold *above value* either through foreign direct investment (with most of the financing being domestic) or through licensing agreements (according to Mansfield, et al 1982, the average age of technologies transferred to their developing economy subsidiaries by US firms during the 1960-1978 period was ten years and 13 years of technologies transferred through licensing; Mowery estimates imports of capital equipment embody technologies that lies somewhere between the age of those avaialbe through licensign and those transferred to wholly-owned subsidiaries), then falling profitability on past investments engendered by moral depreciation no longer obtains in an open system. What may rather come to pass is the perenial debt of those who have used loans to purchase equipment which is economically obsolescent in world market terms. But such modifications to capital's dynamics may not always be important. To the extent that the dynamic of capital itself implies the destruction of vestigal or intermediate classes, then capital's own development renders less effective such interference to its own laws of motion. That is an intersting example indeed. It makes me wonder, what does it take for ther market system to be 'open'. The initial intuition tells "possibility of geographical or lateral expansion." But then, of course, we witness the expanasion into different areas of social activity, first by expanding into new social groups (e.g. the 'marketisation' of the women's work, like child care, or the newest yuppie trend 'subsitute' mothering), and second bly planned obsolescence. The compuer industry gives the latter infinite possibilities, all t\waht it takes a perfectly usable product 'obsolete' is changing a few codes. But that is not the latest word. The trading in "futures" may be intepreted as expanding the existing markets diachronically or vertically in time. How far can that go, Doug Henwood? But if those speculations are correct, that means that capital will always find new reserves for expansion, and that is really bad news for the prediction of capitalism collapsing under the burden of its own contradictions. regards, Wojtek Sokolowski Institute for Policy Studies Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233 Opinions expressed above are those of this writer only. They do not represent the views or policies of the Institute for Policy Studies, the Johns Hopkins University, or anyone else affiliated with these institutions.
Re: US real earnings boom
At 05:00 PM 3/20/98 -0500, Doug wrote: Between Feb 97 and Feb 98, U.S. real hourly earnings for all private sector workers were up 2.7%, led by 3.0% gain in services; manufacturing lagged at up 1.6%. ... Is this a blip, shortly to be squashed by Alan Greenspan, or a real reversal of the downtrend in real hourly earnings that began in 1973? A few weeks ago, the author of the weekly economic outlook pages of BUSINESS WEEK interpreted a statement by Greenspan as saying "if the East Asian crisis doesn't slow the US economy, then I'll do it." in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html "It takes a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed.
Re: [Fwd: Crime and Punishment 1999 (fwd)]
A weensy complement to: When Currie, who has taught sociology and criminology at Yale and Berkeley, advanced similar arguments in his 1985 volume Confronting Crime, the New York Times reviewer noted that the "biggest incarceration binge in merican history" had increased the nation's prison population from fewer than 200,000 in 1970 to 454,000 by 1984. What may have seemed an astonishing number of inmates back in 1984 is dwarfed by the current prison population of 1.2 million, plus an additional half-a-million people in local jails. Fed. Prisons Drug Year Pop.Offenders % - 1980 24,363 6,12025.1% 1982 29,673 7,92026.7% 1984 34,263 10,11029.5% 1986 44,408 16,34036.8% 1988 49,928 22,27044.6% 1990 65,526 35,06053.5% 1992 80,259 47,27058.9% 1994 95,034 58,26061.3% Grwth:390%952% In the same period federal anti-drug spending grew from 2.7 billion in 1985 to over 15 billion in 1997. Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-42) 48242 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Fwd: Crime and Punishment 1999 (fwd)
What is the source on Thomas Kruse's drug offenders prison population data?
Globalization: Fed Reserve Bank View; Here Comes SAFTA
Globalization and Its Effects on the U.S. Economy By Edward G. Boehne, President, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia at the World Affairs Council Of Greater Valley Forge 01:00 p.m Mar 20, 1998 Eastern PAOLI, Pa., March 20 /PRNewswire/ -- The following is the text of a speech given by Edward G. Boehne, President, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia at the World Affairs Council of Greater Valley Forge: The Outlook We have been experiencing remarkably good economic performance. This economic expansion is now in its eighth straight year. With rapid economic growth for several years, the unemployment rate has fallen to near 4-1/2 percent, its lowest level in nearly a quarter of a century. Last year more than 3 million new jobs were created. And all of this was accomplished without a resurgence in inflation. In fact, consumer price inflation slowed to a little less than 2 percent in 1997, after rising more than 3 percent in 1996. Last year's slowing inflation came as something of a surprise to economic forecasters. With demand for goods and services growing rapidly at a time when the unemployment rate is lower than it has been in decades, wages are rising more rapidly. Forecasters thought that pressure on wages would translate into bigger price increases. Indeed, a year ago the major risk facing the US economy was that too rapid growth in demand would lead to overheating and rising inflation. But businesses continue to find ways to improve productivity and keep their unit labor costs down. Businesses also continue to expand their capacity at a rapid clip, with the result that capacity utilization rates in industry are now generally lower than they were three years ago. Faster productivity growth and enlarged industrial capacity both contribute to keeping inflation down. So does a strong dollar and the intense competition that American firms face from their foreign rivals. This year the risks facing the economy are less one-sided than they were a year ago. Today, there is less concern that overheating will occur. In fact, downside risks loom much larger now than they have for the past two years. And as testimony to the growing globalization of our economy, the concern about downside risks to our nation's economy stems not so much from domestic developments, but from international ones. Although there are downside risks, my judgment is that the U.S. economy will continue to grow at a healthy pace. Developments in Asia will mean slower growth of U.S. exports and a rising U.S. trade deficit, but those factors will only partly offset the momentum in consumer spending and business fixed investment. The net result is likely to be more moderate growth than in 1997. Globalization More generally, the effects of globalization on the U.S. economy go well beyond the issue of Asia's effects on the US economy this year. The effects of globalization are going to be more far-reaching and more permanent. "Globalization" means different things to different people, so let me begin by giving you my definition: Globalization is the process of moving toward a world in which we produce, distribute, sell, finance, and invest without regard to national boundaries. Are we in a world in which national boundaries are irrelevant? No, and we won't be anytime soon. But we have been moving in that direction, and we will continue to do so. A German company manufactures cars in Mexico for sale in the United States. Japanese consumers calling a US mail order company to buy sweaters made in Scotland may find themselves talking to telephone operators in Ireland. And portfolio managers in the Hong Kong offices of New York financial firms buy and sell Korean stocks on behalf of British as well as American investors. Globalization, in the sense that I am using it, is driven by reductions in trade barriers and capital controls, by attempts to capture economies of scale, and by dramatic quality improvements and cost reductions in long-distance communications. While many people fear globalization, the process is not fundamentally different from the relocation of manufacturing and the integration of financial markets that occurred within the US in the 20th century. We know that manufacturing plants and jobs moved from the Northeast to the South and Southwest. At the same time, companies established nationwide distribution systems and nationwide brands. Now a company headquartered in Pennsylvania may have production facilities in 6 states, buy inputs produced in 12 states, and sell goods in all 50 states. Similarly, all but the largest Pennsylvania companies used to rely on local banks for the bulk of their financing. Now they borrow not only from local banks but also from a variety of financial firms headquartered in other parts of the country. And residents of Pennsylvania, who used to keep their savings on deposit at local banks, now entrust much of their wealth to portfolio managers in New York who buy stocks and bonds
SA8000: New Global Standards of Social Accountability
[What follows was passed along by Tim Lavery. Both labor and international solidarity activists may find it worth a read. I assume, though he provides no indication, that this article has a copyright held by Quality Digest. I have no further information regarding the periodical, date of publication, etc. Contact them directly if you want permission to use it. (Tim may be able to provide contact information.) Apologies for duplicates as a consequence of cross-posting.] Michael, below is an article from Quality Digest which explains the issue. Think you might find it interesting. Regards, Tim As most quality professionals know, quality products usually aren't produced in conditions where workers are unhappy. Long hours, unsafe working conditions, unfair wages, discrimination and arduous labor can create work environments where quality and employee satisfaction prove rare. However, ensuring fair treatment of employees in today's complex business environment can seem as daunting as it was a century ago. Numerous stakeholders -- suppliers, manufacturers, buying agents, contractors and subcontractors -- share the responsibility of safeguarding worker rights, but sometimes the efforts of these various groups fall short for any number of reasons. The problem may lie in greed and cruelty, as it has so often in the past, or it may stem from something else, such as entrenched cultural differences. To address and, hopefully, eliminate unfair and inhumane labor practices, Social Accountability 8000, a new international and inter-industry standard, has been created. Based on ISO 9000, SA8000 targets workplace conditions in factories around the world. The standard was written by an advisory board of 25 people, including representatives from the Council on Economic Priorities Accreditation Agency, Amnesty International, the National Child Labor Committee, KPMG, SGS International Certification Services, Avon Products, Toys R Us, Reebok, The Body Shop, clothing company Eileen Fisher, Amalgamated Bank and the International Textile Workers Union. The difference between SA8000 and its cousins ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 is that this new standard includes performance requirements in addition to system requirements. SA8000 requires that employers pay wages sufficient to meet workers' basic needs, provide a safe working environment, not employ child or forced labor, and not require employees to regularly work longer than 48 hours per week. "One of the problems in monitoring working conditions or human rights has been to move beyond the anecdotal," emphasizes Eileen Kohl Kaufman, program director for the Council on Economic Priorities Accreditation Agency. "It's very hard to have any sense of what conditions were like last week or have any confidence in what they will be like next week. We felt that by merging the performance audit with a quality systems concept, we'd be able to provide a system that could give more confidence and more comparability, both across industries and across countries." Many companies have developed codes of conduct that promote basic rights and prohibit such practices as child labor, prison labor and discrimination. As a result, hundreds of codes now exist, a situation that not only poses difficulties for suppliers but is extremely inefficient. "The effort to combat serious violations of workers' rights is thus hampered both by a lack of clear definitions of terms and by a lack of consensus on the basic benchmarks in codes themselves," states CEPAA's framework for the standard. Kaufman agrees. "It's difficult for the people from the customer companies who are responsible for monitoring the code of conduct as well as vouching for working conditions," she observes. "It's overwhelming." SA8000's certification process will resemble that of ISO 9000; accrediting certification firms to the standard began in late January. The standard will require certification bodies to educate themselves about the facilities they certify and the regions where those facilities are located. If a registrar wants to certify a facility, it must develop a process for auditing the facility's compliance to the standard. Potential SA8000-accredited registrars include BVQI, ITS Intertek Services, SGS-ICS and ACTS Testing Services. SA8000 requirements The standard has four major sections; the fourth, titled "Social Accountability Requirements," includes nine subsections that cover such topics as child labor, forced labor, health and safety, freedom of association and right to collective bargaining, discrimination, disciplinary practices, working hours, compensation and management systems. Any organization wishing to subscribe to the standard must not engage in or support child labor, which SA8000 specifies as any work by a child younger than 15 years of age (or, in special cases, age 14, in accordance with developing-country exceptions under ILO Convention 138). Nor is forced labor -- defined in the standard as
Chase Manhattan responds
The Chase Manhattan response boggles the mind as Wojtek has noted. On reflection I have some advice to Doug that, rather than annex Canada (which has been the US response for over a century to the upstart pretentions that some other people on this continent have that they might prefer some other, more humane and democratic system than that in our neighbour to the south), all he really needs to do is take out a membership in a Canadian credit union, have his cheques deposited there, and then withdraw his money through a Credit Union (bank) card. You get the current exchange rate with only a 1 or 2 dollar service charge. And you can actually use your credit union card at the local bank machine of the Chase Manhattan bank! Oh, and about the annexation of Canada. I should note that the US citizens of the NorthWest Angle of the US on lake of the Woods are petitioning congress to secede and join Canada because of the rotten treatment they are getting from the US. I just hope the US Government gives them the same support in their seccession movement as it gives to the Kosovo terrorists. Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba.
Re: what's in a name?
Wojtek wrote: It is one thing to say that Marxist theory explains some important aspects of capitalist relations of production (which I think it does), quite a differnt thing to determine to what degree those capitalist relations of production ar implemented in actual societies and to what extent they are mitigated by historical contingencies, Rakesh replied: Yes,it is one thing to study motion in a vacuum and then to determine the modification of motion by air pressure or viscosity. So Marx may have initially assumed a closed capitalist society, without foreign trade or vestigal or intermediate classes. It's interesting how different Marx's perspective is on foreign trade compared to the mainstream view, even if the theoretical impact is similar. Instead of simplifying matters by assuming a closed economy (as US economists are wont to do, or were wont to do until recent decades), Marx treats "the whole world as one nation" in which "capitalist production is everywhere established... in every branch of industry" [CAPITAL, vol. I, Int'l Publ. paperback, 581n]. This assumption is weakened a bit in vol. III. On the other hand, he argues that "vestigial" classes would be swept away by capitalism, by absorbing them into capitalism. Though he seems to have seen them coming, he didn't analyze the intermediate classes generated by capitalism's own development very much -- hardly enough to be satisfying. The new middle classes might be treated as sharing characteristics with both the capitalists and the workers, at least on a very abstract level. I think the main simplication of CAPITAL is that there Marx assumes away the independent dynamics of working-class movements. The book is about capital's dynamics largely holding working class organization constant (holding the cultural-historical level of subsistence constant, for example), mostly dealing with workers' _reactions_ to the lengthening of the working day or the speed-up imposed by the capitalist use of machinery. The book doesn't talk about the development of working class organization toward (or away from) forming clear class consciousness, political parties, and the like (counter-hegemony). But Marx talks about this elsewhere, in other writings. See Mike Lebowitz' book, BEYOND CAPITAL. Bringing in the political economy of the working class -- to complement Marx's political economy of capital -- seems an absolutely necessary component of any effort to understand capitalist dynamics. For example, the relatively high standard of living of US (white male) workers in the 1950s and 1960s resulted from the victories in struggles of the 1930s and 1940s, combined with a relatively good situation for deepening or defending those victories during the 1950s and 1960s (relatively strong labor-power demand, limited capital mobility). This high living standard was fought all the way by capital, but it's only in the 1980s and 1990s that capital is winning full-scale (with obvious exceptions like the UPS strike). To try to understand all of this simply by looking at the dynamics of capital is to miss a lot. in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
US real earnings boom
Between Feb 97 and Feb 98, U.S. real hourly earnings for all private sector workers were up 2.7%, led by 3.0% gain in services; manufacturing lagged at up 1.6%. There's been a steady acceleration in real wage growth since it turned up in mid-1995, with a spurt over the last year; just a year ago, the overall gain was under 1%. Is this a blip, shortly to be squashed by Alan Greenspan, or a real reversal of the downtrend in real hourly earnings that began in 1973? Doug
Re: Chase Manhattan responds
At 03:52 PM 3/20/98 -0500, boddhisatva quoted Chase Manhattan: A little late, but a friend in Chase Manhattan's middle markets department explained their side of the $45 canadian check story: "Some people have a hard time grasping the fact that different countries have different central banks and the technology driving the clearing of checks across borders is not all that it could be. Generally the common commercial practice for transacting business across borders is with either letters-of-credit or electronic funds transfers, aka wires, checks being used exclusively for intra-country transactions. I always tell my customers that if they receive a check from offshore, to tell the remitter to stop payment on it and send a wire instead. It sounds like your friend, associate, colleague, whatever, is frustrated because he does not understand. I would tell him to call his local congressional representative and advocate having the armed forces storm across the US-Canadian border and conquer what could be ours for the taking. Then he won't have to worry about globalization." That is an interesting line of argument that, I am afraid, is quite common in the corporate-speak. It boils down to the following line "Your friend had problem cashing a foreign check, because we do not use foreign checks for international transfers, and we do not use foreign checks for international transfers because (converting the passive voice) we do not use foreign checks for international transfer." Now comes the understanding part which is a bit ambiguous. If it pertains to the grasping of the fact that Chase Manhattan does not cash foreign checks - the author misses the point entirely, because the fact that foreign checks are not chashed was the subject of the initial complaint. If, on the other hand, it pertains to the understanding of the logic "we do not do it because we do not do it" that indeed requires years of corporate brainwashing to take such a gem or newspeak wiht any degree of seriousness. Wojtek Sokolowski Institute for Policy Studies Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233 Opinions expressed above are those of this writer only. They do not represent the views or policies of the Institute for Policy Studies, the Johns Hopkins University, or anyone else affiliated with these institutions.
Chase Manhattan responds
To whom, A little late, but a friend in Chase Manhattan's middle markets department explained their side of the $45 canadian check story: "Some people have a hard time grasping the fact that different countries have different central banks and the technology driving the clearing of checks across borders is not all that it could be. Generally the common commercial practice for transacting business across borders is with either letters-of-credit or electronic funds transfers, aka wires, checks being used exclusively for intra-country transactions. I always tell my customers that if they receive a check from offshore, to tell the remitter to stop payment on it and send a wire instead. It sounds like your friend, associate, colleague, whatever, is frustrated because he does not understand. I would tell him to call his local congressional representative and advocate having the armed forces storm across the US-Canadian border and conquer what could be ours for the taking. Then he won't have to worry about globalization." 'Nuff said, I guess. peace, boddhisatva
Re: a proposed leading indicator
Doug asks: Speaking of indicators, The Nation has asked me to put together a set of economic/social indicators, to be published quarterly, that would be revealing, interesting, and against the grain of conventional thinking. Any suggestions? Harper's notorious Index has items based on all sorts of wickedly clever criteria, most of which would fit that function. Dig in. valis
Re: what's in a name?
In yet another bolt of clarity Wojtek reminded us It is one thing to say that Marxist theory explains some important aspects of capitalist relations of production (which I think it does), quite a differnt thing to determine to what degree those capitalist relations of production ar implemented in actual societies and to what extent they are mitigated by historical contingencies, Yes,it is one thing to study motion in a vacuum and then to determine the modification of motion by air pressure or viscosity. So Marx may have initially assumed a closed capitalist society, without foreign trade or vestigal or intermediate classes. Let us assume a closed national capitalist economy (which may not be Marx's assumption). If the current stock of machinery or inventories of such machinery has suffered moral depreciation, this may represent a destruction of value in an enclosed national capitalism. However if such morally depreciated machinery can be sold *above value* either through foreign direct investment (with most of the financing being domestic) or through licensing agreements (according to Mansfield, et al 1982, the average age of technologies transferred to their developing economy subsidiaries by US firms during the 1960-1978 period was ten years and 13 years of technologies transferred through licensing; Mowery estimates imports of capital equipment embody technologies that lies somewhere between the age of those avaialbe through licensign and those transferred to wholly-owned subsidiaries), then falling profitability on past investments engendered by moral depreciation no longer obtains in an open system. What may rather come to pass is the perenial debt of those who have used loans to purchase equipment which is economically obsolescent in world market terms. But such modifications to capital's dynamics may not always be important. To the extent that the dynamic of capital itself implies the destruction of vestigal or intermediate classes, then capital's own development renders less effective such interference to its own laws of motion. Best, Rakesh
RE: funny story about AER (was ASSA session cuts)
I should have noted that the letter was a copy (also sent to the ICARE list) that was sent to John Siegfried, Secretary of the AEA. I only learned from John Adams that he was the official author of the dump letter. I went to grad school (U-Wisconsin-Madison) with him, so took the opportunity to make a more direct appeal. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 20 Mar 1998 12:27:00 -0500 "Fellows, Jeffrey" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A few years back, the University of Utah library tried to use journal usage as a method of deciding which journal subscriptions to maintain. They told patrons to leave the journals on the tables after examination, instead of reshelving them. After a period of time, the library began labelling the journals which were to have their subscriptions cancelled. The AER was on the list! As a qualifier, I think many of the few mainstream faculty (and the department) had the AER in their offices. I do doubt the AER was allowed to be cancelled, external program review problems and such, but it was a hoot to see the cancellation notice. I bet similar use studies (crude as it was) would produce the same results at many mainstream schools. Jeff -- From: Colin Danby To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: ASSA session cuts Date: Thursday, March 19, 1998 9:11PM Barkley: Great letter. Is there any value in having more of us unwashed types write in support? If so can you post a name and address to write to? Thanks, Colin PS If AEA is busily stifling us hets is there any good reason to remain a member? I could easily manage without my own copies of its ubiquitous ( iniquitous) journals. -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: a proposed leading indicator -Reply
Louis Proyect wrote: Related to this is the question of the number of people living in apartments, those who are not homeless but who are miserably crowded. The NY Times ran articles last year about the horrible problems facing Mexican and other immigrants who are crammed 10 to a one-bedroom apartment in sections of Queens or the Bronx. Contagious illnesses like TB, fires, and psychological stress make these places hell. Speaking of which, I highly recommend Peter Kwong's book, Forbidden Workers, recently out from the New Press. It's a study of illegal Chinese immigrants (and Peter insists on using the word "illegal," not undocumented), mostly in NYC. How they get here, why they left, what they expect, and the mainly horrible fate that awaits them in the USA. 70 hour workweeks @ $3 an hour - some of these in Chinatown sweatshops with UNITE! contracts - living 15 to a room, sleeping in shifts on stacked bunks, eating the meanest diet, suffering diseases of overwork and poverty, living in intense social isolation. He's got a chapter, "Manufacturing Ethnicity," showing how the bosses use nationalist rhetoric to secure their status. A compelling story, and an analytical model of how ethnicity and class work together. Doug
Re: what's in a name?
At 12:46 PM 3/20/98 -0500, you wrote: Mr. Sokolowski's post illustrates the misconception that socialism and a command economy are anything like the same animal. If socialism was a command economy, then it would be true that the difference between socialism and capitalism was a matter of degree. Therefore, Marxists can happily conclude that socialism is *not* characterized by the presence of a command economy. Instead, it is a question of ownership. When ownership is constituted in a capitalist way, we have capitalism. If ownership was ever to be constituted in a socialist way, we would have socialism. Fortunately for young socialists, ownership has never been constituted this way, and thus the putative "socialist" regimes of the past need not be a millstone around their necks. There, that ought to finish *that* debate. :) I reply (WS:) That is not what I arued for, but what I argued against -- the tendency of the bourgeois punditry to equate the Soviet economic regime with "marxism" or socialism. Since I alredy replied to a similar criticism elsewhere, I will simply attach that posting here. Regards, WS enclosure: It seems to me that Wojtek's assessment of socialism vs capitalism is quite wide of the mark. First, Marx's theory (like any) is meant to explain phenomena, not describe empirical reality (a notoriously slippery customer). My reply (WS): I was not talking about differences in the content of abstract concepts or theoretical models using those concepts. I am well aware of the fact that human mind is capable of making really fine conceptual distinctions. From my standpoint, a theretical model can explain a chunk of reality only when it fits that reality, that is, describes it accurately. That does not mean positivistic fetishism of 'emprical statements' which is closer to cult thann empirical science (on that see, for example, my earlier postings in opinion polls to this list). It simply means that a theoretical model must be relevant to empirical reality it purports to explain. To illustrate that with a simple example, the rat-choice model underlying the neo-classical economics explains the behaviour or rational economic actors in nearly 100%. The only problem is that the "rational human actor" exists only in that particular theory, and the rat-choice model's power to explain real-life behaviour approaches zero. So what we are having here is a classical example of 'explanation' in a psychological sense only, an 'explanation' that gives us a feeling that we 'know what's going on' without any empirical testing of that knowledge-- which is the same as mythology or religion. It is one thing to say that Marxist theory explains some important aspects of capitalist relations of production (which I think it does), quite a differnt thing to determine to what degree those capitalist relations of production ar implemented in actual societies and to what extent they are mitigated by historical contingencies, and still a different thing (that has little to do with Marxist theory itself) to see the empirical world as the battle ground between 'marxist' or 'socialist' and 'free market' or 'capitalist' regimes. My initial comments pertained mainly to the third 'thing' mentioned above. It questioned the validity of the bulk of (mostly) American social science that uses the dichotomy. Second, the test of between and within groups variance is a fine (theory) for statistical analysis as a privileged criterion of validity. I reply (WS): The concept of partinioning variance, although the wroking horse of statistical methods of data analysis, is hardly the exclusive domain of statistics. Statistics only adds a numerical 'spin' to it that allows us to calculate the probability of random error (due to sampling), but you can partition variance without the theory of probability. For example, if you assume that the cases in your data set represent the total population rather than a sample drawn from the population, you can still calculate the means and variances for different groups of cases and calculate the ratio of the 'explained' variance to either the 'unexplained' or the 'total' variance. What you will not do in such a case is calculating the significance test, i.e. you would take your F ratio for its face value rather than calculate the probability that its deviation from 1 is due to sampling error (since no such error exists for populations). The concept of partitioning of variance is directly related to the most fundamental human cognitive faculty of making concpetuial distinctions and categories -- grouping what is similar and separating what is dissimilar (or the proverbial apples and oranges). Statisticians did not invent it, they merely proposed a different method of doing it. In my original posting, I did not specifically call for calculating means and variances from the means, although that is one of many possible methods of approaching
Re: a proposed leading indicator
Sure, let's use an index of the prescription of Prozac, Ritalin, etc. But for what? as a measure of how mentally ill our society is? It's definitely true that it's not just individuals but society that's mentally ill: egged on by school bureaucrats and drug companies -- and allowed by scared and ignorant parents -- pediatricians who don't know anything about mental illnesses are over-diagnosing attention deficit (and hyperactivity) disorder and over-prescribing Ritalin. Further examples can be listed, I am sure. We should be careful about rejecting these mental medications: not all are bad, including Ritalin. There are kids for whom Ritalin works as advertised. (The scuttlebut among parents is that you can tell that a kid really has ADHD or ADD if the Ritalin works.) My son, who has a mild case of autism (a.k.a. Asperger's Syndrome, which recently got its public debut in NEWSWEEK), which have some side effects that seem to require Zoloft (a Prozac substitute). (It's always a matter of experimentation and careful observation to make sure the medication and the dosage are correct.) Psychiatrists, a more expensive bunch than pediatricians, are the only ones who should be prescribing this stuff. In summary, the prescription of ment. meds should not be totally avoided as much as treated with extreme caution. Unfortunately, the profit-driven system with its top-down system of control won't allow that. The above should be titled "Jim Devine on Drugs." ;-) in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html "A society is rich when material goods, including capital, are cheap, and human beings dear." -- R.H. Tawney.
a proposed leading indicator -Reply
Doug, Glad to hear the Nation wants you to do such a regular feature. As a housing planner for Berkeley dealing with homeless policy, services and programs, I have some indicators kinda close to my heart for you to consider. How about the number of estimated homeless population per 1,000 resident population? Another indicator could perhaps include the percent of households in America paying 50 percent of their income in rent, then the percent of households at or below 50 percent of their regional median incomes who pay 50 percent of their incomes in rent. It would be interesting to gauge how the poor fair relative to the middle class in that regard, and over time. I don't know if the nation's (small n) data sources on the experience of welfare reform is up to the task, but some gauge of how many people left the rolls after August 1996, by the reason for their exit (e.g., having gotten a job versus being cut because of non-compliance with their "work plans"). I would also suggest some health related indicators, including perhaps AIDS cumulative TB case rates, with resistant-strain TB, as well as price indicators on the costs of various classes of drugs, such as protease inhibitors and antibiotics. Finally, a number of cities and communities around the country have passed or are considering living wage ordinances of various kinds and stripes. Some sort of regional-oriented living wage indicators would be interesting and useful, as an alternative to the CPI. To the extent you can get the Nation, with its New Look, to incorporate good graphics, it seems you're the guy to do it.
RE: funny story about AER (was ASSA session cuts)
A few years back, the University of Utah library tried to use journal usage as a method of deciding which journal subscriptions to maintain. They told patrons to leave the journals on the tables after examination, instead of reshelving them. After a period of time, the library began labelling the journals which were to have their subscriptions cancelled. The AER was on the list! As a qualifier, I think many of the few mainstream faculty (and the department) had the AER in their offices. I do doubt the AER was allowed to be cancelled, external program review problems and such, but it was a hoot to see the cancellation notice. I bet similar use studies (crude as it was) would produce the same results at many mainstream schools. Jeff -- From: Colin Danby To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: ASSA session cuts Date: Thursday, March 19, 1998 9:11PM Barkley: Great letter. Is there any value in having more of us unwashed types write in support? If so can you post a name and address to write to? Thanks, Colin PS If AEA is busily stifling us hets is there any good reason to remain a member? I could easily manage without my own copies of its ubiquitous ( iniquitous) journals.
Re: a proposed leading indicator
Speaking of indicators, The Nation has asked me to put together a set of economic/social indicators, to be published quarterly, that would be revealing, interesting, and against the grain of conventional thinking. Any suggestions? Doug
Re: further progress in econonmics
Thanks, Doug. In the past I have sometimes used slavery as an example of the vacuousness of the pareto criterion. It's nice to have a formal proof. Peter Dorman
Re: absurd (fwd)
To whom..., On Wednesday C. Rakesh Bhandari reminded us of the classic idea about the financier - that he is a leech and a drain on society. Although every Marxist impulse drives me to agree, I must not. As the question about Japan becomes not whether it will crash but whether it will tunnel into the earth and burn, it likewise becomes clear that the U.S. is doing something right and the industrial super-producers are doing something wrong. It cannot be that the U.S. is competing on the industrial production side, so let's simply concede that point and move on for the moment. The next reasonable conclusion is that the U.S. (and Britain) are punishing workers so badly that they are making up the difference in industrial production. This does not seem, even to my jejune economic eyes, to be reasonable. The dollars and pounds just aren't there, it seems. That leaves another alternative. If we, as leftist economists (okay, if *you* as leftist economists, and if I as a leftist duffer) agree that absent capitalist hegemony there would be greater production, it makes sense that capitalism can profit by getting out of its own way. This does *not* boil down to supply-side economics. When market discipline actually *disciplines* the vast bureaucratic police state that peoples the office towers of capitalism, it may be that economic benefit, while not produced, comes shining through. It may be that production is down but not only is the average price of a good more efficient, but the *liquidity* represented by a good is greater. By this I mean that the sale of a given good hits the *capitalist* bottom line faster. That capitalist bottom line is not cash, but credit. Credit is a market phenomenon. Goods are a market phenomenon. Ideally they are as intimate as possible. When credit markets are king and investment bankers rule, it makes sense to have these people running industry. If nothing else, it gets industrialist and banker on the same page. Meanwhile, market discipline has hit the world of credit with a vengeance. Debt is securitized with ease. I recently found out that Chase Manhattan Bank has an internal trading desk in loan swaps that has more than a thousand traders and has a nominal open interest of more than a trillion dollars. That is more than the nominal open interest in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Let the keretsus have their societies of industrial mandarins, CMB has market capitalism in its pocket. Therefore when Merck introduces a new drug, that drug's potential success is translated quickly to Merck's stock price and bond rating. That allows the capitalists at Merck to use their improved, market-rationalized credit to get into new technologies, or whatever. Merck may not turn around and build a facility in the U.S., but it may be able to build a foreign facility on good economic terms. The cost per good imported into the U.S. goes down, and living standards go up, although the percentage of imports rises. The wages of the working class may be slowly settling to the bottom of the lake, but the "value" of what they can buy is not. It's not long-term sound, but maybe it works that way short-term. In any event, the bottom line is that if American capitalism is expanding and increasingly market-efficient America has the potential to do better. This is not because of trickle-down, but because capitalists are leveraging domestic markets more effectively. Obviously this will not last forever, but it may last as long as the investment liquidity is out there - as long as the baby-boomers are buying stocks and bonds. When the boomers stop investing, the party is over. When they start dis-investing, the fun begins. Meanwhile, short the Yen and fund the revolution. peace boddhisatva (on the green in four)
more Wall Street wisdom
I just heard a stock pundit in CNBC who was touting Pfizer, which has the Street all, um, excited over its new impotence drug. "The stock just hit 90, and stocks that hit 90 almost always go to 100." See why these guys make so much money? Doug
Re: CONFERENCE (Binghamton): Work, Difference and Social Change
Global Workplace" Richard Sharpe, "Globalization: The Next Tactic in the 50-year Struggle of Labour and Capital in Software Production" -- Dear Phil: I am in India researching the software industry. Is there any way I can get a copy of the above paper? My address: Anthony D'Costa 203 Avensdale 5 Moyenville Road Langford Town Bangalore 560 025 India E-mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: a proposed leading indicator
Jim, I like your idea! Isn't there a "contrarinan" shool of invesment analysts who use Time covers and the sort (I think somebody uses this at Barron's). The key thing, is that economists are so full of crap (most of the time) re: "turning points" that your indicator is probably an indicator or a "hyper- peak" in the business cycle. Jason
