From: Ian Wright (iwright@GMAIL.COM)
Date: Sun Sep 19 2004 - 18:09:25 EDT
From Julian Wells. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Julian Wells <julianwells@gn.apc.org> Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004 19:39:27 +0100 Subject: Re: Fwd: [OPE-L] OPE-L:_Wage_share To: wrighti@acm.org <..snip..> My response to Paul C's points is >Paul C >------ >Farjoun and Machovers proposition that >a) the distribution of the profit share will be Gamma I'm still working from memory (my copy of F+M is in deep storage at the moment -- but surely their claim is that the rate of profit and rate of wage bill will be gamma, not the profit share? If I'm wrong, I'd be grateful for a reference. >b) that the narrow the dispersion the closer the wage share will be to >50% >Is in principle testable. I'm happy with the idea that s/v is in practice a non-degenerate random variable tightly concentrated round 1. >David has come up with some figures >which seem to support the proposition, Just checking, but is this company data, or what? >what is missing is >a test of the extent to which the distribution is actually >a Gamma one. Locke's test implements the Lukacs Theorem idea involving the characterisation of the gamma and is your starting point if you want to go beyond a Kolmogorov-Smirnov g.o.f. test (but see Shapiro and Chen (2001) for comments and alternatives). >However the interesting thing about F&M's argument >is that it points one to look at something one would not >otherwise have looked at - the dispersion of the profit share >as a determinant of the global average rate of surplus value. Difficult to say anything definite about this; maybe I need to look at the OPE-L archive and bring myself up-to-date... >As to all firms but 1 having zero s/v and the other having >all the s/v, well there is no 'necessary' reason why this >will not happen. There is also no necessary reason why my teacup >should not experience significant Brownian motion, it is >just the laws of chance are against it in both cases. Quite -- however, I find that 50:50 Earl Grey:English Breakfast provides sufficient impulse to get me out of the house in the morning ;-) Julian
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