ahh now i know what you're saying sandwichman. i think this is an important point. however, i think the evidence we have shows that this is largely a low demand recession, rather then an obsolescence recession. why you ask? because unemployment is high across all sectors. if it was really excess capacity or inefficient (financial wise, not technical wise) productive processes, unemployment would be concentrated in a few sectors and capacity utilization rates would become much more highly variable between sectors. this isn't the case. that said, i don't think we should deal with the unemployment problem by having the government buy an arbitrary amount of output. as i said in my response to the "marxist final exam for keynesians", i support increasing the demand for labor directly by hiring labor directly. remember that there are leading and lagging sectors even during booms. the full employment of labor doesn't mean that obsolescent machinery can't be worked through, especially if aggregate demand policies aim to employ labor directly.
-- -Nathan Tankus _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
