On Jan 15, 2008, at 4:06 PM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> James Heartfield wrote:
>> You can argue with the definitions
>> of GDP all you like,
>
> I'm probably past three posts to day (no rollover from prior months
> lurking Doug?), but anyhow.
No official rollover, but you've earned some indulgence. Just say a Hail Mary and an Act of Contrition.
> Yes that is a problem you can't shy away from. But just as important,
> the 1994-2007 period makes no conceptual sense so shame on you for
> defending it as a logical period for analysing trends and cycles.
> (Doug,
> same for you using that WB table.)
I really don't know what you're talking about here. You made a claim about "successively declining" GDP growth rates, and I showed that conventional stats yield no such thing. Comparing decades isn't all that unusual a technique really. It's a discipline against picking starting and ending points that might favor a particular point of view, for example.
> No, Harvey's book Limits to Capital *extends* Marx's countervailing
> tendencies argument (sorry about 'the whole point' as that was a bad
> phrase to use). He extends it spatially (especially invoking real
> estate
> and globalisation), temporally (especially invoking finance) and more
> recently into capitalist-noncapitalist spheres. How could you have
> missed that, lads?
These extensions countervail so much that they become meaningless. Especially since the frequently advertised comeuppance never seems to come up.
That Reinhart & Rogoff paper that annoyed you so much is interesting because it shows, among other things, that financial crises are pretty regular things. Their real-world effects range from none at all (Barings 1995) to a recession lasting about two years, with an average growth rate of -2% (for the "Big Five" crises in their classification). That's nasty, but not all that big a deal - and none had serious political effects. I think one of the reasons the paper annoys you is precisely because it shows the ordinariness of financial crises.
>> When Marx talked about crises, he had in mind real world events,
>> that were
>> evident to all, not hidden laws at work under the surface of society.
>
> Huh?! Das Kapital repeatedly shows how dialectic analysis derives the
> laws of motion - including crisis formation - that exist independ of
> contingent events.
In other words, if crisis doesn't happen in practice, it's still lurking there somewhere in theory?
>> Patrick argues with the fact that the capitalist system has vastly
>> expanded
>> its workforce world wide, but other than saying that these jobs
>> are not well
>> paid (which is true) and that there has been a decline in Chinese
>> manufacturing workforce (which is just daft)
>
> I think, actually, it's true. Where's Marty H-L when I need him.
> Marty?
Yeah, Marty, help Patrick prove that the Chinese boom has all been an illusion!
>> And I would agree with you, especially in the West, but anemic
>> growth is
>> most definitely not 'crisis'.
>>
>
> It is if you live in most of Africa, comrade...
Africa is really the outlier in the capitalist world. It's understandable why, after four centuries of imperial looting. But it's not representative of what's been going on. China and India have, what?, four or five times the population of Africa.
Doug