[lbo-talk] Re: New Imperialism?

[Autoplectic]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 19:39:15 -0600, Seth Ackerman <sethia at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> John Mage wrote:
> 
> >
> > Doug,
> > Or to put it another way, do you contend either that Prebisch-Singer
> > were wrong, or that their findings for the period before 1950 have not
> > in fact been even more true in the last half century?
> > john
> 
> Prebisch-Singer never argued that rich countries were rich because of
> unequal terms of trade. They argued that poor countries were poor for
> that reason. If the United States had continued to specialize in grain
> and cotton after the Civil War, we too would be poor today. I don't
> think anyone would argue that we industrialized (say, from 1865-1898)
> because we were imperialist. We became a lot more imperialist *after* we
> industrialized (and probably because of it).
> 
> And I think the consensus in economic history is that the P-S
> statistical argument was wrong. Over the long term, there is no clear
> trend in net barter terms of trade. Right now, by the way, I bet NBTT is
> trending strongly in favor of poor countries: commodity prices are
> booming because of China, while manufactured products are experiencing
> low inflation. Yet imperialism abounds. And lately its main economic
> consequence has been, of all things, to raise oil prices so Hugo Chavez
> can consolidate the Bolivarian revolution!
> 
> I think Prebisch missed the point. It's not that a unit of raw materials
> buys less and less manufactured goods. It's that an hour of labor spent
> producing raw materials yields less and less relative to what an hour of
> labor producing mfgs yields. Because of productivity growth in mfg, an
> hour of labor yields more and more, while primary industries just aren't
> capable of much productivity growth.
> 
> Seth

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William Milberg argues that "the South" is caught in a contemporary P-S trap at:

http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/integration/download/publicat/4_3_247_wcsdg-wp-33.pdf

See section 7.