Carrol Cox wrote: > The "long run" in reference to employment and unemployment seems utterly > irrelevant to lived exeperience. Men and women are either employed or > not employed NOW -- and the relevant future is rather limited: more than > two or three years and their past life has been destroyed, and nothing > that happens can recover that past life.
The "long run" has more than one interpretation. To the orthodox school of economics, it refers to a situation where all prices (including wages) have adjusted completely to surpluses and shortages. So in 1933 or so, these folks said "if we just let nature take its course, the unemployment situation will get better." To which Keynesians replied (citing something Keynes said earlier, I believe), "in the long run, we're all dead." They were right. It turned out that getting to the "long run" required a gigantic nudge from WW2 arms spending. In another vision of the long-run (from followers of Ricardo and/or Marx), the long run again involves equilibrium (equalization of the rate of profit between sectors). But this long run is never achieved. But it's not purely notional: instead it represents a "center of gravitation" for the movement of prices and other economic variables. Since there are other forces constantly changing or shocking the economy, the tendency toward long-run equilibrium always faces counteracting tendencies. Just because the Earth is the Moon's center of gravitation doesn't mean that the Moon is crashing into the Earth. But that the Earth is at the center of the Earth-Moon system is crucial. (BTW, the Earth also rotates around the Moon... But the Earth has much more mass.) Yet another version of the long run refers simply to the (macroeconomic) trend, which involves widening one's perspective rather than simply focusing on the business cycle. This makes sense to me: even though people live in the "now" and are being hurt by the (what seems to be a) recession, capitalism will likely see a recovery and even a prosperity period. (It's not like the working class is ready to take charge or that the economy is about to attain the Malthus/Ricardo stationary state -- the economist's equivalent of the physicist's universal heat death.) So we shouldn't ignore the trend. BTW, one might interpret the Marx/Engels story in the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO as involving a conception of long-run equilibrium. Communism -- where class exploitation, domination of humans by humans, and alienation -- have gone away represents a situation where society-level conflicts have shrunk to zero magnitude (though personal conflicts may remain), so that there's no internal impetus to change. An equilibrium. However, there are obvious counteracting forces that prevent the attainment of that equilibrium: the capitalists fight hard to maintain the current "disequilibrium" situation because they benefit so much from it. The CM-implied notion that "history is on our side" (where "we" = the proletariat, socialists) is based on the existence of a true equilibrium "out there," so that there are inherent tendencies that undermine capitalist rule and resistance to revolution. (If we can just figure out how to totally understand and take advantage of those tendencies...) -- 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
