On Jan 18, 2008, at 10:10 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
>> You're maddening to argue with. You say growth has declined
>> successively, without specifying any time or region.
> Doug, have I ever said 'growth declined'? No, not if GDP; I have
> always
> pointed out - including in a paper we were supposedly going to
> coauthor
> last year - that the *rate* of growth had declined, decade by decade
> (over full business cycles), from the 1960s through 1990s, with the
> 2000s ambigious.
You said: "the 1990s and first half of the 2000s saw progressively lower per capita growth rates." You didn't say where, or in comparison with what. The stats I presented for 18 World Bank regional and conceptual categories show no such thing.
It would have been hard to co-author such a paper, unless we did it some Derridean style.
>
>> But that's
>> really true in no time or region in the last 25 years. When that's
>> shown to you, you criticize the technique, and say we should really
>> be talking about depreciation of the natural world.
>
> Yes, that's true, and we should also talk about unpaid women's labour.
Well, sure. There's a lot of stuff we could talk about. My lower back pain, the short cheerless life of an industrial chicken, the 2006 Pere Ubu album, the salmon cornets at Per Se, NYC real estate transfer tax revenues, the relative earnings penalties for gay men and women, etc. But I like talking about one thing at a time. Maybe I'm just getting conventional in my old age.
>> SA isn't
>> experiencing a boom and no one ever claimed it is.
>
> Oh, you're not reading The Economist or FT too closely, comrade! (Or
> debate list!)
I read the FT every day. And most of Debate too. China is having a boom. SA isn't.
>> China is
>> experiencing a boom, one of the most remarkable in history, despite
>> the best efforts of some Marxists to deny it (because it violates
>> theory?).
>>
>
> No, because it leads otherwise sharp minded comrades like yourself
> astray. Marty and Paul do a *great* job at debunking of Asian Miracle
> myths, give them credit.
There's something of a flat-earther about the urge to debunk "Asian miracle myths." Fifteen or twenty years ago, the same sorts were denying that South Korea and Taiwan were booming. The rise of Asia is world-transforming. It should be analyzed, not debunked.
> Sure, capital intensity is the quickest way to nominal productivity
> growth and comparative advantage, and rising K/L ratios are
> observed all
> over the world, and accompany shrinking manufacturing, mining, and
> agricultural workforces. Do I need stats to introduce you to this
> phenomenon?
What is so sacred about the primary and secondary sectors? Factory work sucks. It's dirty and dangerous and the more machines can do it the better off we all are. Can't we ever grow out of this productivism?
>> You seem to think that unless you argue that capitalism is
>> collapsing, or on the verge of collapse, then you approve of it.
>
> No, but researching volatility instead of being so damn sanguine would
> give you an extra bow in the quiver, comrade.
One man's sanguine's is another woman's realistic. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. economy has spent 86% of the time in expansion. I don't see why I should focus so much energy on the other 14%. And if your critique is only applicable one month out of every six or seven, then who's going to listen to you?
On the Debate list the other day, you said you were rooting for a deep U.S. recession to reconfigure global power relations and reduce CO2 emissions. Such a recession would throw scores of millions out of work in North America, Asia, and Latin America. I'm sure the working class in all those places would be appalled by your cheerleading for their suffering, and wouldn't find much comfort in the payoff you wish for. If a remark like that got wider circulation, it would confirm the old right-wing smear that reds and greens are elitists eager to impose their views on the unwilling masses. Bill O'Reilly would have a lot of fun with that one. Thankfully he doesn't read Debate or lbo-talk.
Doug