Doug Henwood wrote:
> rc-am wrote:
>
> >thanks for this. I'm afraid I haven't had the time to do any real research to
> >back up my current reflections. You would have thought that access to stats
> >would have been an ideal use for the web, but unfortunately I have yet to
> >find a decent world economic statistics site yet. All the commercial
> >economics publications charge (hardly surprising for a bunch of capitalists I
> >suppose). If you have any leads on on-line sources I love to hear of them.
> >I'm particularly interested to source data on productivity in terms of
> >average personhours per unit (as opposed to meaningless monetary figures).
> >This is to check out a conversation I had with my US source (my father :-)
> >who mentioned that industrial strategists in the US had only recently done
> >widespread research on physical productivity levels and were quite shocked to
> >find that, stripping away the obscuring effect of money, physical
> >productivity levels in the US were much closer to East European that German
> >or EU levels. This ties into my ideas on the effects of imperialism (briefly:
> >a release of pressure on the search for relative surplus value, leading to a
> >decline in physical productivity vis-à-vis lesser imperial countries - as
> >happened with the UK during the second half of the 19th C). Obviously I'd
> >love to get hold of some figures to check this out. Any ideas would be
> >brilliant.
>
> The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has some international stats - on
> employment, unemployment, earnings, and productivity - at
> <http://146.142.4.24/cgi-bin/dsrv?in>.
>
> "Average personhours per unit" is the meaningless concept here. Units of
> what? There are good reasons productivity figures are done in money -
> technically, money acts as the universal equivalent, the only way to equate
> a Jewel CD and a duffelbag; and socially, everything in capitalism is done
> for money, so that's the measure that really matters. On certain homogenous
> things where you can use physical measures, like labor hours per ton of
> steel, U.S. producers have massively improved their performance, and are
> now among the most efficient in the world. But even a car can't be
> considered a unit - they vary too much, whether at one moment in time (a
> Hyundai vs. a BMW) or at widely separated moments in time (a 1966 Ford
> Fairlane vs. a 1999 Taurus). Statisticians try - heroically, though
> probably hopelessly - to adjust for those qualitative differences using
> monetary measures, so in that sense a monetary unit is a better measure
> than a physical unit. Conceptually at least; whether the beancounters can
> pull it off is another story.
>
> Doug
--
Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901