From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Mon Nov 03 2003 - 10:52:37 EST
Phil Dunn wrote: > > I associate these R-potentials with natural wages and natural prices > (or, more accurately, natural price markups). These natural wages > and prices are not sums of money. In a simple reproduction model > money prices and wages would be equal to natural prices and wages but > natural prices and wages come under intrinsic value. A natural price > markup is a property of an individual valorization process. A > natural wage is a property of an individual producer commodity (an > producer commodity is individuated by skill -- so all plumbers would > come under one individual producer commodity). > > Adam Smith distinguishes between natural and market prices and wages. > I am dropping his ideas of natural rates of profit and rent. Market > prices fluctuate and at any one time are dispersed about natural > prices. To measure the natural price markup we use wage data. We > use real wages -- the average hourly wage is equal to 1. Then we > recalculate each firm's wage bill using not the actual wage paid to > each worker, but the economy-wide average wage paid for each type of > skill. Since these economy-wide averages will be statistically > independent, the recalculated real wage bill will be immunized > against market noise. The greater the number of different skills > used by the firm the better this works. This seems an interesting procedure could you please elaborate on what data one would need for this. Would you need a breakdown in the wage bill of each sector into types of labour for which the wages were paid? > This recalculated real wage > bill is an estimate of the natural price markup, the R-potential for > value creating labor activity. Is the wage bill an estimate of natural price markup, or is the ratio of wage bill to selling pirce a measure of natural price markup? > > > The natural wage is a bit more complicated. We use price data. We > need to do a least squares fit: > > minimize with respect to x the square of (y - Mx) > > where x is a vector of hourly natural real wage rates, y is a vector > of recognized labor activity, measured by money, expressed in hours > and M is a matrix. The element M(f,t) gives the hours worked in firm > f by workers of skill type t. We need to have the number of firms > much greater than the number of skill types to get good immunization. > > The potential price markups should be equal to wage bills > recalculated at natural wage rates. Have you done any studies using this method? -- Paul Cockshott Dept Computing Science University of Glasgow 0141 330 3125
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