On 9/3/2010 12:52 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
> Doug to Eric: 'It's why capital hates Keynesian arrangements'
>
> No, I don't think so. The capitalists of the 1960s favoured such Keynesian arrangements, which seemed to correspond to the secular expansion of capitalism at that time.
So, here is how the average incomes of the richest tenth of 1% in the US fared over time (with capital gains and without). These numbers are sensitive to business cycles so I calculated them strictly from peak to peak, for consistency.
If these aren't "capitalists," I don't know who are. This is how their *actual* income performed - not an indirect measure of one subset of income, i.e. the profit rate. This is the summary measure of how different conjunctures and styles of capitalism actually affected the capitalists.
w/o CG w/CG
1953-60 17.0% 22.0% 1960-69 32.1% 35.4% 1969-79 4.8% 3.9% 1979-89 27.7% 25.5% 1989-2000 32.4% 48.5% 2000-07 7.5% 7.1%
What this shows, I think, is that "rational" capitalist preferences concerning social arrangements are radically indeterminate. Capitalists did extremely well when their social power was highly constrained (1953-69) and almost identically well when their social power was highly unconstrained (1979-2000). Each regime culminated in a period of malaise.
SA