Re: Global Financial Crisis II

1997-11-27 Thread valis
Quoth Tom re Max: If the bubble breaks, there is some disruption and often some socialization of the losses, but life more or less goes on. Where's the apocalypse? The disruption and the socialization of the losses are not random processes. Life goes on more or less for some people

Re: Failure of high tech welfare bashing in California

1997-11-27 Thread valis
Having just read this report, words simply fail me. This is a seamless network of interlocking ironies and a candidate epitaph for our civilization. Save your Ebola rockets, Saddam; we're doing it all by ourselves!

Re: Global Financial Crisis II

1997-11-27 Thread Tom Walker
Colin Danby wrote, No, increased labor force participation by itself will raise the unemployment rate not lower it. Look up the definition of unemployment. Colin, I'm not impressed with this facile hair splitting. Why don't _you_ go look up the definition of solipsism. You might have

Re: Global Financial Crisis II

1997-11-27 Thread Colin Danby
Tom W on Doug: A family in which two adults have to be working full time to earn a similar level of income contributes twice as many participants to the labour force and thus "improves" the employment picture. It's magic: lower incomes + higher labour force participation = a lower rate of

technical change

1997-11-27 Thread James Devine
Because Ajit's most recent missive in our discussion of the issue of technical change and its implementation in practice (and related issues such as the absolute vs. relative immiseration theory) got into extreme repetition, insults, and the like, I've decided to respond to Ajit off-list. If he

Re: Global Financial Crisis II

1997-11-27 Thread Tom Walker
Doug Henwood wrote, I know it's sometimes thrilling to mount a moral high horse and declaim, but I was responding specifically to the assertions in the original histrionic document that there was something fishy about U.S. employment numbers. There's nothing fishy about the *numbers* -- they

Re: Global Financial Crisis II

1997-11-27 Thread Doug Henwood
valis wrote: Quoth Tom re Max: If the bubble breaks, there is some disruption and often some socialization of the losses, but life more or less goes on. Where's the apocalypse? The disruption and the socialization of the losses are not random processes. Life goes on more or less for

re: technology

1997-11-27 Thread Ajit Sinha
At 08:59 24/11/97 -0800, Jim Devine wrote: I had written: I think it would be more accurate to say that Marx's "fundamental theoretical position" involves a belief in the falling secular trend in real wages _relative to labor productivity_, i.e., a falling _value of labor power_. There's a large