Michael Perelman said... "Regarding Nathan's synthesis, one reason why Sherman may have been right as well as Shaikh et al. Consider the automobile industry in the 50's and 60s. Very little competition occurred. Studebaker, Hudson, & American Motors survived at the margin with the support of the Big Three to reduce the threat of antitrust.
With international competition, which heated up later, the monopolistic profits evaporated. Intellectual property rights tightened to protect some key industries from such foreign competition as the US economy heated up." I find your line of analysis interesting and I want to follow up on it by taking what I see as the "classical marxist" perspective. I actually don't think one need to go to lack of competition for an explanation. If you think of it in terms of average socially necessary labor time on a world scale, The socially necessary labor time it took to build a car in the united states was very below average in the "world market" because the technological innovations hadn't yet been defused across the world. As a result the American car companies were actually out competing others. In the late 1960's and on the technological innovations became more generalized and what Schumpeter would call "innovation rents" disappeared. As an aside I think marx had a lot of interesting and suggestive thoughts on trade theory and balance of payments but I think they've been underdeveloped severly in a lot of the Marxian writings I've encountered. -- -Nathan Tankus ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
