From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Fri Oct 24 2003 - 11:21:56 EDT
gerald_a_levy wrote: > It occurs to me now that an even simpler way toget rough estimates for this would be tocalculate: global GNP > ------------------------ global population and: global wealth ------------------------- global population The latter figure might > be more useful but statisticson national wealth are more difficult to obtain thanstatistics on national income. I recognize that there are problems > with GDPincluding not taking into account most goods andservices that are not for sale, ignoring theunderground economy, and not taking > intoaccount external costs, but these problemswouldn't make the statistics meaningless as allthat one would want for the purposes at hand isa rough > estimate. Alternatively, one could tryto adjust GDP figures to account for theseproblems if one views them as statisticallysignificant -- which > some of them, e.g. theunderground economy, probably are. After one had these numbers then one could makeestimates about what goods and services a > globalsocialist society could afford to provide for its citizensgiven whatever the current state of the productive forcesis. Okay, the above is > probably too simple. Please explainwhy. In solidarity, Jerry There might be problems with this as not all the activities listed in gdp would be productive labour that would continue under socialism. On the other hand, the labour could in principle be transfered to other activities without changing the magnitude of GDP greatly, so you would not be far out. -- Paul Cockshott Dept Computing Science University of Glasgow 0141 330 3125
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