Dear Doug,
A friend of mine forwarded me the video and your note below from LBO Talk.
In fact, the debate at the Brecht forum, for which you have the video, is about the question of the dynamism of the US economy, not about whether we are today entering an economic crisis, as will be evident to anyone who follows the video. To see this immediately, simply take a look at Sam's talk, which follows mine, and my initial response to Sam's talk.
I argued at the Brecht forum, as I have for a long time, that the US economy has experienced declining economic dynamism since 1973, expressed in deteriorating economic performance in terms of virtually all of the main macro-indicators, decade by decade, business cycle by business cycle. The only exception, I argue, is the second half of the 1990s, when the US economy expanded rapidly, in part as a result of the partial but abortive recovery of profitability that took place between early 1980s and 1995 or so and especially as a result of the wealth effect of the "New Economy" equity price bubble of the years 1995-2000. In any case, in my view, however one interprets the 1990s, US economic performance in the seven years since the new business cycle at the start of 2000 put paid to any idea of renewed US economic dynamism, as it has been plainly the worst for any comparable period since 1948. The burden of my argument at the Brecht forum was that, grasping this declining economic dynamism, not least in the current business cycle, is indispensable for understanding what's happening in the economy today.
At the Brecht forum, I distributed a set of data to support the above. Most of this is readily available in my Economics of Global Turbulence (2006) (EGT), especially p.240, Table 13.1 "Declining Economic Dynamism" and pp.282-283, Tables 15.1 thru 15.6, under the general title "The Decline of Profitability and Its Consequences," as well as numerous graphs on the path of profitability for the private economy as a whole and for manufacturing for the US, Japan, and Germany.
Sam argued that the shift of the US economy that took place at the start of the 1980s, and to neoliberalism more generally has endowed the economy with new dynamism. I obviously deny this.
The video continues an ongoing discussion between myself and Sam and Leo Panitch. The first installment of which can be found in a collection edited by David Coates, Varieties of Capitalism, Varieties of Approaches, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), where there's statement of position by Sam and Leo, as well as a critique of me by a student of theirs (Martijn Konings), and a response by me to both Leo and Sam and their student.
Leo and Sam have an article in NLR (n35) that appeared later, partly on the same subject, though without reference to the discussion in the Coates volume.
For the record, I certainly did at the end of my talk venture the view that, yes, we are entering into a recession, which could well be quite serious, though I didn't get much opportunity, due to time constraints, to say why I think so. I fully stand by this proposition. It should be self-evident that predictions like this must, by nature, have a very tentative character, but I think they can be useful in checking our understandings of the economy, especially if the reasons underlying them are elucidated as clearly as possible.
But, I want to emphasize that the objective of most of my published work on the economy has been to establish the continuing reality of the long downturn into the present and to try to explain it...especially in terms of the trajectory of the profit rate. This will be self-evident even to those who follow the video, especially as I argue there, as elsewhere, that one of the distinctive, distinguishing features of the economic trajectory of the US and other advanced capitalist economies since 1973, by comparison with the period before WWII, has been precisely the avoidance of crisis/ ability to avoid crisis—especially through the growth of credit underwritten in one way or another by the state—and the prevalence instead of declining economic dynamism, i.e. the long downturn.
Just to dot the i's and cross the t's: it's sometimes argued against the above that the long downturn is a statistical illusion, resulting from comparing the economy post 1973 with the ostensibly exceptional long boom. However, as I argue in EGT, the long postwar boom 1950-1973 is not so exceptional, when compared to the previous long upturn 1890-1913…and that economic performance/dynamism in both these long upturns is decisively better than in the long downturn after 1973. See EGT, p.xxvii, Table 1.
For those who are interested, the complete video of the Brecht forum, which was made by graduate students from the sociology department at NYU is directly below. The version you posted was truncated for some reason.
I'd be grateful if you could put this note on LBO talk, for purposes of clarification.
Thanks much...and Happy New Year!
Bob
Here is the full video:
http://mgc.blogsite.org:60/blog/2007/12/11/when-neoliberalism- implodes-left-perspectives-on-the-current-political-economy/
from Henwood to lbotalk:
Thanks to Lou Proyect for pointing this out. There's a multipart video of a recent discussion on capitalist crisis or not between Robert Brenner (yes) and Sam Gindin (no) at:
You won't be surprised to learn that I'm with Sam on this one.
Doug