Also, how much of the manufacturing consists of products that get high prices because of intellectual property protection; i.e. products that have relatively little manufacturing activity per dollar of sales.
>
>
> By my calculation, US manufacturing output per capita has risen by 98%
> since 1980 - i.e., almost doubled. Total output per capita *excluding*
> finance has risen roughly 228% - i.e., more than tripled. I don't know how
> much investment in plant, equipment and infrastructure is supposed to be
> enough, but clearly it's been sufficient to produce a very healthy
> long-term secular rise in useful output. The roots of the present crisis
> lie (partly) in the fact that *on top of* all that output produced
> domestically, we've consumed a rising amount of additional output imported
> from overseas and financed the purchases with debt. Also, it's not true
> that there's been much in the way of redistribution from wages to profits.
> There has been a redistribution from the wages of low-paid workers to the
> wages of high-paid workers - a phenomenon that Marxists can't find much
> analysis of in Marx, so they've tended to talk about it as if it were a
> question of wages versus profits, which it's not. In my view, the
> elephantization of finance, in addition to laying the groundwork for the
> crisis, is probably also at the origin of a lot of the redistribution - as
> leverage has expanded, net revenue per employee in the financial industry
> has risen, permitting enormous pay increases for high-end workers, which
> then spread to other sectors of the economy through competition for
> educated workers as well as through social norms. As income polarized,
> people on the sagging end of the distribution tried to keep up with the
> consumption patterns of those on the rising end, financing the extra
> consumption with debt (which, in turn, further fueled the expansion of the
> financial industry and the pay packages there). Marx isn't of much help
> here - though Veblen is, as is Minsky.
>
> SA
>
>
>
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-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com