Yoshie writes:
> So, the profit rate [in Japan] did get from low to lower, & I think the change is
significant.<
Right. Even if Barkley is right that Japanese companies don't maximize profits, a
falling
profit rate does lead to a decline in one major source of investment funds.
I wrote:
>>The way I think of this is that the tendency for the rate of profit it fall is
>basically
a microeconomic theory of how capitalists have to keep on striving to expand or else
they'll lose out to their competitors. In many cases, this causes a macroeconomic
overaccumulation, which is sometimes -- in a "labor scarce economy" -- expressed as
"overaccumulation relative to supply," which looks a lot like Marx's classical theory
of
the falling rate of profit.
Something like this happened in the late 1960s/early 1970s in the US, combined with
wage
squeezes on profits combined the rise in international competition (cf. Brenner) that
prevented the wage hikes from being simply passed onto consumers.<<
Yoshie writes:
> Isn't Japan "labor scarce economy" due to its sexism, low birth rate, resistance to
immigration, "inflexibility" in the labor market, etc.? <
it's quite possible, but I'm an ignoramus on the subject of Japan.
> Isn't the Japanese "problem" more "overaccumulation relative to supply" than
"overaccumulation relative to demand"?<
that may be, but how have wages moved relative to labor productivity trends?
-- Jim Devine
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