Tom wrote: > Does anyone know what the adjustment is in these numbers? Is > there as much > wiggle room for the government as there used to be in oh, say > 1979? And how > much "seasonal adjustment" are cube rats allowed? more than > 0.07, I betcha. Discussing productivity is one of the least productive things economists do. They generally cannot even agree about the raw data, as these 2 FT articles wonderfully showed. It's not as if hindsight seems to help. Fierce arguments still rage among economic historians about productivity growth rates in the British Industrial Revolution prior to 1850. However, there are some easier handles on the problem. There are 3 factors influencing productivity change (up or down): available energy, knowledge (science+technique + other kinds of info) and finally, complexity-states. Exosomatic energy growth (exosomatic = artificial ways to amplify human physiological energy output/consumption), plus better (more efficient) application of energy plus the synergies which come for a more diverse and complex society, all lead to productivity growth, and they are all interlinked. The ancient Persians and the Romans knew of petroleum and used it, but lacked the science or complexity to make it the basis of production. Rome's slave-mode of production created its own kind of entropic over-complexity which finally made feudalism *without towns, without civilised knowledges and institutions* more efficient, relatively-speaking. If you try to focus exclusively on energy and ignore the other 2 factors, you cannot explain much. This is where I disagree with Jay Hanson. What he actually does is to deploy a concept of 'net energy' which when you actually look at it, is just a residual category wherein Jay lumps the two 'black boxes' of science and complexity (in other words, for economics, as well as for many specialities like systems angineering, industrial psychology, industrial ecology etc). When Hanson debates US Geological Service chief economist (and leading oil *optimist*) Ahlbrandt or energy economists like Michael Lynch, it's mostly a dialogue of the deaf. Ahlbrandt has the typical-economists reverse-mirror-image black box, ie, for him energy inputs are just a given. He does not acknowledge entropy or that markets cannot always find substitutes for any scarce resource, even fossil fuel. The answer to the current debate about productivity and the New Economy (although I don't expect to see Doug Henwood put it this way in his upcoming book, which he just refused to let me preview) is that increasing complexity is not a linear process but one which consists of movements between various equilibrium states (Barkley Rosser, q.v.) and the oscillation between these states may not be smooth. The switch over from the world of so-called "advanced organic societes" (medieval China, pre-industrial Europe) where the average human energy consumption/use was 2200 Kcal/day, to industrial socieities where by 1930 average per capita energy consumption had risen to 150 000 Kcal/day, occurred in a matter fo a few decades. The switch BACK to an energy-hungry state can be just as swift and over-OMPLEXITY will be one of the reasons it happens: complexity is entropic, and socieities which grow more complex, for various well-understood reasons, become stagnant, inert, incapable of growth, most activity consists of compensating for the adverse consequences of over complexity, and most energy is wasted. In our case, an actual shortage of recoverable energy reserves (recoverable in either economic, or entropic, or energetic terms: whichever of the 3 calculuses you want to apply) is compounding and aggravating growing systemic over-complexity. The Internet revolution undoubtedly helps to reduce complexity and reduce capital turnover times, but IT is also highly entropic, creates much useless information, is a major new energy sink, and cannot solve the underlying problem, ie cannot of itself restabilise world capitalism. Which is why the system is headed for one of Stephen Jay Gould's equilibrium -punctures, and the swift and chatoc transition to a completely altered state. Mark _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
