Duncan:
>Well, it seems to me that Paul C and Allin's research program (of which I
>am a major fan) would embrace measuring, for example, the rate of surplus
>value and the turnover rates for capital using actual price data (say from
>the income statements or balance sheets of firms, or from National Income
>Data). I was contrasting this with the method of first using embodied
>labor coefficients derived from I/O tables to convert the accounts to
>"labor values" and then doing the measurements, as some people have
>suggested. There is surely a fundamental disagreement about the
>philosophical and theoretical foundations of the LTV, but curiously
>enough, it may not affect operational measurement very much.
>
Paul C:
I agree with much of this. We embarked on our empirical work on the
correlation of prices with labour values to overcome reviewers objections
to a paper we submited to Capital and Class on changes in the rate of
profit and exploitation in the UK. We had used national income stats for
this, but were knocked back by reviewers who objected that surplus value
was a theoretical category not subject to empirical measurement.
We then added to the paper a demonstration of the close correlation
between the prices and values in the UK economy, and with these additions
it was accepted for publication. So Duncan is right is saying that
our motivation, like his was to justify use of national income
statistics as a source.
Paul Cockshott
wpc@cs.strath.ac.uk
http://www.cs.strath.ac.uk/CS/Biog/wpc/index.html