Doug Henwood wrote: > There's this great thing called Google - which in PEN-L land operates > largely without capital assets
Doug, generalizing like this is wrong. Maybe some people on Pen-l think that software isn't a real "capital asset." But I don't agree with them. It's just an asset that depreciates quickly. and > Reading PEN-L sometimes you'd think that the BEA and BLS are staffed by a > bunch of dolts. I, for one, don't think that the BEA or BLS are staffed by dolts. BTW, if we to generalize about Pen-l's attitude toward those agencies, I'd say that instead of sneering at their intelligence, Pen-lers think that their excessively influenced by capitalist politics. as for my opinion on this, I think it depends on what you mean by "excessively." the BEA: > Recognition of software as investment.--In the NIPA's, business and > government expenditures for software are now recognized as fixed > investment.7 The investment flows are now capitalized and included in the > net stocks of private and government fixed assets. Software investment has > three components--prepackaged software, custom software, and own-account > software. Prepackaged software has an average service life of 3 years and is > depreciated geometrically at a rate of 0.55 per year; custom and own-account > software have average service lives of 5 years and are depreciated > geometrically at a rate of 0.33 per year. In tables 1 and 2, software is > included in all the components except private nonresidential structures and > residential. For 1996, the inclusion of software as a fixed asset added > about $174 billion to the net stock of private fixed assets and about $56 > billion to the net stock of government fixed assets. In other words, they don't care about the specific kind of depreciation they're measuring. They simply apply an accounting formula. They don't care about moral depreciation _per se_. Maybe they are dolts. Likely, in practice (as opposed to NIPA), morally-depreciated software ends up in the trash, and thus is counted like broken machines, etc. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
