[lbo-talk] employment

[Cliff Staples]

Which has little or nothing to do with what I said. I'm of the "nothing's 
too good for the working class" school, and I think people deserve more 
aesthetically pleasing places to shop than gigantic bare boxes with goods 
hideously piled about. But leave that aside - my question was where are the 
productivity gains from Wal-Mart going? Not to the workers, for sure, even 
the managers. Sure, customers get good deals, but most Wal-Mart customers 
come from a class that's barely making ends meet. That leaves the 
shareholders, which don't have much to do with socialist dreaming.

It seems to me that this is the fundamental political question of 
economics: who benefits from increased in productivity?  But of course it's 
been decades since we had anyone who dared to call him or herself a 
political economist... now we have political science, which claims to 
explain politics without much talk about economics, and an economists who 
want to explain the movement of money (or value) without any reference to 
power... two disciplines that now can tell us very little about how the 
world works... but never mind!

I thought Jeremy Rifkin did a very nice job in his much overlooked book The 
End of Work putting the matter on the policy table: will the end of work 
(i.e. increased productivity) mean leisure time or unemployment lines?  The 
answer is a political question: how will the benefits of increased 
productivity be distributed?

I remain pessimistic that even liberal democratic governments, even 
foresighted ones, will establish redistributive mechanisms to assure a more 
equitable distribution of those benefits.  I think only when there is more 
democratic control over the surplus at the firm or organization level (i.e. 
a transformation of the class structure) will we see a more equitable 
distribution of the benefits of increased productivity (assuming the data 
on productivity have some relationship to what's actually going on in 
firms).  Of course I'm even more pessimistic about that coming about 
anytime soon then I am about the redistributive spunk of liberal 
governments...  Then again, it's only Monday; maybe things will look a 
little better later in the week.

Cliff

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