Nathan, We have all kinds of evidence which could support all kinds of labels for the recession. Mostly what people are going to do is start from their theory and look for the evidence to support it. My story (and I'm sticking to it) is that there was an Asian Tigers boom (and bust) followed by a dot.com boom (and bust) and finally a real estate boom (and bust). The booms were engineered. The busts were more or less inevitable.
In citing Keynes, I didn't mean to suggest an exact parallel with the situation in Lancashire in the 1920s. The obsolescence in play today has to do with the social relations of production and reproduction, not with physical plant and machinery. The government can't get the economy "back on track" with a little well-timed stimulus spending to boost aggregate demand. Basically -- to make a long story short -- "things have got to change." You're talking about the economy as if it weren't a dynamic evolving thing. -- or more precisely AS IF its dynamism and evolution were more or less incidental, almost ornamental. "There are leading and lagging sectors..." At this point the leading sector of the global economy is... wait for it... moral hazard, swindling and influence peddling. Stimulating aggregate demand would just be pouring mineral water into a cesspool. On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 11:19 PM, nathan tankus < [email protected]> wrote: > 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 > -- Sandwichman
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