From: Jerry Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Tue Jan 17 2006 - 09:38:17 EST
> And I am not sure about this tremendous increase in > the global labor supply relative to the existing working population > being unique in the history of capitalism--of course in absolute > numbers it is staggering. But in relative terms perhaps not, though > I am hardly sure. Rakesh, It's unique at least from the perspective of a) the history of late capitalism, b) the standpoint of a dramatic shift in the quantity of new wage-workers producing commodities for sale primarily on international markets in a 'globalized' economy. (see next to last para. below) > What about 19th-20th century immigration to the US, > much larger then in relation to existing population than immigration > is today (the absolute number of immigrants is today about the same as > it was in the years before WWI)? Well, you'd have to look at the historical statistics to be sure, but I think most of those immigrants became wage-workers who primarily produced commodities for sale on _domestic_ markets. > what about the increase in working population from colonialism? > what was the rate of population growth then? I doubt that the rate of infusion of new wage workers into the global labor force who produce commodities for sale on international markets ever took place within such a short historical period as now. Also, the international division of labor is now significantly different than it was in periods when you had colonialism. What this means, for instance, is that workers in the colonial period in colonized nations tended to be involved in extractive production, i.e. to the extent that they produced commodities for sale abroad, they tended to specialize in the extraction of raw materials and the production of intermediate goods and in the transportation sector. In the current period, we are seeing a large percentage of the new wage-workers that Freeman was referring to producing final goods for export which have already been assembled. The question shouldn't be whether this new trend is unique; the question should be (imo) what are the consequences for understanding the current period. In solidarity 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
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