From: Jerry Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Tue Jan 17 2006 - 16:10:48 EST
Re: [OPE-L] the global labor force and capital accumulatio> Again I ask the question of what it > means to say the supply of capital is fixed and how that is > to be explained. > I am posing clear questions about Freeman's article. > I understand that you may not find my question interesting. That > is alright. But let's not pretend that you are speaking in any kind > of conversation with me. Rakesh, Let us not pretend that you initiated the thread or that your questions were the first. To refresh your memory, you can re-read the original questions which I posed ... and you have not addressed: <http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/ope/archive/0601/0069.html> As for your questions about Freeman's article, I _did_ address them in the best way that I knew how -- by _not_ succumbing to uninformed speculation. See the 'PS' from the previous message (reproduced below). > Now as for your previous "reply" to my questions > about Freeman's analysis, I was quite surprised by > this cavalier statement: > There are other disanalogies and analogies: even if one > accepts Grossman's argument, one can not reasonably > claim that the current transition "is a necessary and > constitutive element of capitalism." Yet one might claim that > this "can and should only be a transitory tendency". > Jerry, do you mean that the worsening situation of labor vis a vis > capital and the absolute growth of the surplus population "' can and should only be a transitory tendency'"? No. What I wrote was very simple, not in the least bit 'cavalier', and should not have been particularly controversial. I don't think anyone claims that the changes in the international division of labor following the transformations in the former USSR, many Eastern European nations, and the PRC were necessary and constitutive elements of capitalism. Since capitalism had long been the dominant mode of production internationally before these changes, it would be absurd to argue that they are "constitutive" of capitalism. As for my second sentence above, one might claim that the privatization of industry in formerly 'socialist' nations and the increase then in the quantity of wage-workers in those nations producing commodities for sale on international markets 'can and should be only a transitory tendency.' There are, after all, hardly any more 'socialist' nations left in the world so the extent to which this trend can be further generalized and internationalized is rather limited. As for your questions about Freeman's article, I can not answer what he means when he claimed that the supply of capital has been relatively stable. But I _did_ attempt to address the issue of _how_ that question can be answered in the following: >>>>>>>>>>>>>> PS: I'm not sure how Freeman came up with his estimates for the how "the effective supply of capital ... has virtually remained unchanged". While his estimates for a change in the capital-labor ratio have been widely cited on the Net, I haven't been able to discover the original source for the estimates. You could see his NBER page -- <http://www.nber.org/~freeman/> -- where many of his papers and his CV are online to track down the original source. Or, you could (following the example of Paul B) ask him: freeman@nber.org >>>>>>>>>>>> If you seriously want to know more about Freeman's position, then the makes some suggestions about what you can do. In solidarity, Jerry
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