Sabri Oncu wrote: > As you know, every now and then Michael Perelman prepares some videos > on some topic of his interest and puts them on the internet for free > so that we can watch them and learn something. Now suppose that for > some funny reason Michael changes his mind and decides to charge us 10 > dollars per view of his videos (Ravi helps him free so that he can set > up a website with all the bells and whistles,security things, pay pall > arrangements and the like). Also suppose that there are 10,000,000 > people, including us, who are willing to pay Michael 10 dollars per > view and Michael collects 100,000,000 dollars from his viewers.
As economists say, "assume we have a can opener." > So, > the economic rent he collects is 100,000,000 dollars (ignoring the > fixed costs he incurred by now). How much of this is surplus value? It's impossible to give an exact answer without more information -- including that about the economy as a whole. To some extent, MP is extracting surplus-value from Ravi (even though the latter is volunteering to produce it), raising the size of the society-wide pool of surplus-value. To the extent that MP gets profit above that indicated by the average rate of profit, MP is getting a monopoly rent. If his capital investment is extremely small, most of his profit would be rent. However, some of that rent would correspond to the surplus-value that Ravi produced, so that not all of that rent is surplus-value taken from other "entrepreneurs." A first guess would be that MP's rent income would be any profit that he gets above the average rate of profit assuming that Ravi gets paid the going wage (rather than being voluntarily super-exploited). > Last year, I made 30% on my long term treasuries in my retirement > account, because the long term interest rates went down bad. Say, I > started with 1 billion dollars and ended up with 1.3 billion dollars. > Under this assumption, my economic rent is 300,000,000 dollars. How > much of this is surplus value? The surplus-value would be all of what's left after you send me a check for my share of the total. Actually, none of this activity involves the production of surplus-value and contributions to society's pool of surplus-value. Instead, it's a matter of increasing your _claims_ on society's pool of surplus-value. If that pool stays the same size, then you are gaining at the expense of other speculators. > On January 1, 2010, I bought a house in Istanbul for 300,000 dollars > and on January 1, 2011 sold it for 500,000 dollars. The economic rent > I collected is 200,000 dollars. How much of this is surplus value? Again, no surplus-value was produced. But you gained from a redistribution from others. -- Jim Devine / "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." -- Paul Dirac _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
