Fred wrote: "Chapter 17 says nothing about technological change causing the composition of capital to rise and the rate of profit to fall." From the context it appears that Fred thinks such change does cause indeed the composition to rise and the rate of profit to fall.
In the course of one cycle, technological change is not crucial for the rate of profit to fall. Prosperity prepares for crisis by the very act of accumulation, that is, investing profit; it becomes capital that must earn profit, too. In the absence of new technologies that absorb investment, find lots of demand, and promise good returns, profit is still turned into capital. It might go into low-tech construction, as seems to be happening in China; it might go into paper capital like mortgages and chimerical paper alluding to mortgages, in which case you might not call the process accumulation, but it is still boom and bust. Regarding secular trends rather than the cycle, technological change has not been shown to raise the composition of capital economy-wide, except in a few early decades of industrialization. Charles Andrews _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
