I am reminded of Lloyd Bentsen's retort to Dan "Potatoe" Quayle, "I knew Jack Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."
Well, I knew the 1950s, 60s and 70s. I lived through them. Thomas, 2008 is not 1948. Let's just say I'm all for "restoring the link between wages and productivity growth." But for me that entails first of all defining what that link is, not treating the word "link" as some mysterious black box that somehow responds positively to better labor laws and enforcement and exchange rate policy. What is the link? Show me the link. Or, better yet, why don't I show you the link and you can critique my claim. The link between wages and productivity resides in "labor power", which is also to say the productive potential of a given expenditure of labor time. There is, of course, a famous theory presented by Karl Marx about the link between wages and productivity that examines such concepts as socially-necessary labor time, and the relative and absolute production of surplus value. But there is also a much less famous "marginalist" theory of the hours of labor, delivered by Sydney J. Chapman in 1909, that confirms -- from the standpoint of neoclassical analysis -- the same point about the centrality of labor time established in Marx's theory. Time, in other words, is of the essence. You can talk all you want about minimum wages, fair wages and living wages but those ideas aren't going to amount to much more than slogans without an effective limitation of the length working day (implying in the term "working day" also the limitation of the number of days of wage employment in the week, year etc.). On 4/7/08, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> cited: > America's Exhausted Growth Paradigm > > 1980 brought a new kind of business cycle, one that's no longer sustainable > > By THOMAS I. PALLEY > > We need a new economic paradigm that restores the link between wages and > productivity growth, and again makes wage income the principal engine of > demand. Remedying the generation-long rupture of the wage-productivity link > will require the restoration of policies aimed at full employment. Full > employment will give workers bargaining power. That will encourage wage > increases, which will fuel spending, productivity, and investment. Achieving > full employment will require coordination of monetary, fiscal, and > exchange-rate policies toward that end. > > Also necessary is a change in the balance of power in labor markets.... .... .... .... -- Sandwichman _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
