>Not to brag, far from it, but I am indeed a "trained economist," with
>more than 25 graduate course in economics and math through advanced
>calculus!!
25 *different* courses? By the way, what exact contribution has your knowledge of, say, the Hamiltonian formalism, so beautiful in the domain of energetics, made to your economic analysis? Please explain.
>See my article, "The labor market is unlike any other," in an
>old issue of Monthly Review. Maybe you'll learn something.
Let's see. You note that minimum wages are often lower than they could be without provoking an unemployment effect.
You summarize and critique Card and Krueger's explanation for why wages could remain below this point in a competitive economy. I could follow neither your summary of their explanation nor your critique of it. And I was surprised that you seemed to have nothing critical to say about the upward limit they do put on the min wage before it does have an unemployment effect.
Then you point out that higher wages can be had by some employees as opposed to others of equal ability if the former's firm enjoys monopoly or superprofits. Of course the argument you say you are making here is that wages depend on bargaining power and firm strength in a given market structure, not marginal productivity (that's why wages are low when unemployment is high--workers have less bargaining power).
But you don't really lay out what the differences between the surplus and marginal procutivity traditions are, so as a non economist I had little sense of the point you were trying to make.
Finally you argue for trade union organisational activity to be directed at so called regulating capitals. How this would improve the lot of the vast majority of workers employed elsewhere you do not explain. You then suggest (without any evidence) that so called regulating capitals are abroad which seems to give workers here very little clear direction. The limits of trade unionism as it exists within present law you don't explore. You then call for keynesian full employment, suggesting the only barrier here is the lack of political will.
Which seems to open the door to the electoral politics that Botwinick's teacher has entered with his sponsorship of the taller democrat under the spell of a preacherman. It all doesn't seem very Marxist, or radical for that matter, to me.
Yours, Rakesh