"Brave New World"

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Michael Yates wrote:


>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