From: paul cockshott (clyder@GN.APC.ORG)
Date: Fri Jan 09 2004 - 06:59:42 EST
Ian I am impressed by your model but I think you should examine the extent to which the way you fix the range of wages relative the exogenous money stock may have influenced your results. Some sensitivity analysis here would help. -----Original Message----- From: OPE-L [mailto:OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU] On Behalf Of Ian Wright Sent: 08 January 2004 18:31 To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Subject: social relations and macro-economic phenomena Hello Michael, >... how can you say that the functional forms that are describing income >distribution are not the result of class struggle? In a nutshell, because it is possible to explain them without reference to the class struggle. However, it is possible that the class struggle is part of the story, and I do not have a definitive point of view on the relation of the class struggle to many of these empirical forms. To do so would require elaborating on what things are counted as examples of class struggle. But consistent with my methodological prejudice I have tried to determine just how much can be explained with minimal assumptions that make no reference to the class struggle or other subjective factors. The answer turns out to be "quite a lot". It's a long argument, but in summary I've developed a model of the wage-capital relation that explains a broad range of macro-phenomena. I hope this may be of interest. My view is that the social relations of production are highly explanatory to an extent perhaps not fully realised, and that many of the striking phenomena of capitalism are the result of abstract, structural features of the social organisation of production. Here is a link to a recent paper that contains the argument. The wage (more precisely the wage interval) is an exogenous parameter to the model, which is why I remain open-minded on this issue. http://www.arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0401053 The abstract is appended. ATB, -Ian. The social architecture of capitalism Abstract A dynamic model of the social relations between workers and capitalists is introduced. The model is deduced from the assumption that the law of value is an organising principle of modern economies. The model self-organises into a dynamic equilibrium with statistical properties that are in close qualitative and in many cases quantitative agreement with a broad range of known empirical distributions of developed capitalism, including the power-law distribution of firm size, the Laplace distribution of firm and GDP growth, the lognormal distribution of firm demises, the exponential distribution of the duration of recessions, the lognormal-Pareto distribution of income, and the gamma-like distribution of the rate-of-profit of firms. Normally these distributions are studied in isolation, but this model unifies and connects them within a single causal framework. In addition, the model generates business cycle phenomena, including fluctuating wage and profit shares in national income about values consistent with empirical studies. A testable consequence of the model is a conjecture that the rate-of-profit distribution is consistent with a parameter-mix of a ratio of normal variates with means and variances that depend on a firm size parameter that is distributed according to a power-law. _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
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