--- Stannard67 at aol.com wrote:
> This article suggests that Marx was wrong about the
> falling rate of profit,
> particularly as applied to the U.S. Refutation,
> anyone? mjs
> But there is another reason which Schumpeter
> suggested. Innovations go on
> improving the net product of labour and,
> consequently, the profit rate would
> never fall. Innovations would always keep the profit
> rate from falling. This
> was a brilliant theory and has generally been
> vindicated especially in the
> US."
>
I'm no expert on this, and Lord knows I am not a fan of the labor theory of value, on which Marx's usual derivation of the tendency of the RP to fall depends. But I note that Robert Brenner, who also does not rely on value-theoretic assumptions (he uses Marx's historical materialist argument from increasing automation), argued with rather overwhelming detail that the RP has indeed been falling sharply since 1973, in America first of all. If so, Schumpeter, for all his brilliance, got it wrong.
jks
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