From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Wed Jan 24 2007 - 21:23:11 EST
> On Wed, 24 Jan 2007, Rakesh Bhandari wrote: > >> Most interestingly Jha accounts for the unraveling of the Westphalian >> order in the terms of a theory of overaccumulation, which explicitly >> draws from Giovanni Arrighi but echoes a one William Playfair (on >> whom Henryk Grossman wrote his last essay). > > The William Playfair who invented time-series graphs in economics? Yes that very trendspotter. Playfair described the transition from an industrial economy in which liquid capital was just sufficient for investment opportunities to a creditor nation in which liquid capital has become superabundant. Drawing on Arrighi, Jha talks of a scissors movement of liquid capital accumulation and investment opportunities. "As a gale of creative destruction sets in, opporunties for the invesment of liquid capital in new fixed capital equipment rises rapidly As the new equipment replaces the old, the rate of profit rises and icnreaes the rate of capital accumulation. But each replacment of the old geeneratin of equipment, and older management practices with the new, circumscribes the opportunities for further rapid increaes in productivity. The rate of profit on future investments in fixed capital therefore reaches begins to fall just as the rate of profit on existing capital reaches a peak. This creates an inexorable pressure for the mounting stocks of profit on past investment, ie. of liquid capital, to find new investment opportunities. That is when capitalism assumes it hegemonistic form and begins to reorganize large parts of the world." Jha, p. xix But this sounds like Playfair who anticipated Hobson who was exhaustively cited by... Rakesh > > Allin Cottrell >
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