Hans is saying what I said, in a different way. If we view capitalism as one big factory (as we should) then national income and product accounts can be used to measure value (with some modifications).
On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 10:34 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I think the result Brian is getting is pretty accurate, but there > are two things wrong with your calculation: > > (a) You say that the burger flipper adds $1 to the value of each > hamburger. Where does this number come from? To compute it you > would need to subtract the cost of materials and equipment > transferred to the burgers from the price of the burger. I don't > see you doing this but the $1 seems to be a guess. Everything > else you say is based on this guess. > > (b) You cannot use firm-data for this, because due to the > equalization of the rates of profit, some of the surplus-value > created by labor intensive firms shows up as profits of capital > intensive firms. > > Both of these objections can be remedied if you use national > income data. I tell my class that their wage is roughly half of > the value created by their labor. I can back this up by the > following simple calculation. According to the Bureau of Labor > Statistics, > > http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm > > total employment in the US is presently 142,974 thousand. > With 52 weeks in the year, this means that 142974 x 52 = > 7,434,648 thousand weeks, or 7.434648 billion weeks, are > worked every year. > > According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, > > http://bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm > > Gross Domestic Product in the third quarter of 2012 is at such a > rate that for the whole year this would give $15,775.7 billion > current dollars. Dividing this by the number of weeks gives > a value produced per person-week of $15,775.7 / 7.434648 = > $2121.92 in current dollars. > > Now the BLS gives the "median weekly earnings" as $760 per week. > This comes from > > http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.pdf > > Dividing this gives 760 / 2121.92 = 35.8 percent. Including > benefits, and making all the other adjustments which need to be > made here one gets probably that average wages are a little less > than half of the value created by the worker. I would agree that > the wages at MacDonalds are probably only a third of the value > created, because unskilled laborers are in a worse bargaining > position. But it would be better to make the example with a > so-called well-paying job, because even those get only about half > of the value created by the worker. > > I made a very similar calculation for my class in 2007 using the > exact same source data, see > > http://marx.economics.utah.edu/das-kapital/2007SP/1090.html > > and got a more favorable outcome for the workers: their earnings > were 40.0 percent of value created. I think the difference can > be explained by the speedup since the 2008 crash. > > Hans > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, at the very least you should know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
