Jeff Sommers:
>airline industry. He essentially argues that pre deregulation oligopoly
pricing
>generated higher profits which in turn generated sufficient R & D to
revolutionize
>tech far faster resulting in significantly faster price drops....
This squares with the analysis made by Pat Devine and alluded to in a talk
by Dave Kotz at a recent Socialist Scholars Conference, namely that
competition such as the kind that exists in the Adam Smith model is HOSTILE
to technical innovation. Capitalist firms would under-invest normally
because their competitors can easily mimic the new improvements without
undergoing the same expenditures. In reality, monopolistic firms are
generally the ones that promote R&D, especially those that receive tax
subsidies or have ties to the military. Bell Labs was a major innovator for
many decades, but as soon as the phone companies were broken up, Bell Labs
switched to market research from pure science or engineering. The
implication for socialists is clear. Socialism, rather than capitalism, is
potentially a source of rapid modernization and progress rather than
capitalism.
Louis Proyect
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