[lbo-talk] Crises and left opportunity

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Wed Feb 16 07:31:08 PST 2011


[WS:] I am generally with you, but I think your concept of living standards is a bit too narrow. Part of the high living standards game is the ability to externalize the costs of certain institutional arrangements i.e. pushing it on someone else. The US has a much greater capability in this area than most other countries, especially x-Soviet block ones. In fact argument can be made that the chief problem of the former planned economies was their relative low ability to externalize cost - but that is another discussion.

What it means is that (1) The US standards of living would not be nearly as high as they seem if the US-ers had to pay the full cost of these standards, (2) ceteris paribus, certain institutional arrangements pose much higher "transaction costs" on standards of living than other arrangements which in turn (3) necessitates the externalization of these costs to maintain standards of living of selected segments of the population, and (4) certain standards of living entail enormous waste of resources that threatens life on earth.

So the ky task before us is not to merely compare standards of living but to compare them at the actual cost at which they were achieved. If the full cost were taken into consideration, I am pretty sure that the between country differences would look very much different than those based exclusively on per capita consumption.

Wojtek

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>wrote:


> Joanna: Just keep watching. And what continued improvement could you be
> talking about?
>
> I gotta say, this post was a doozie.
>
>
> Somebody: Well, here's what I'm talking about. When you look at the
> formerly socialist or communist countries and examine at their
> anti-communist counterparts, the gap isn't that astounding. In other words,
> the chasm between China and Taiwan or Vietnam and Thailand isn't that
> impressive to say the least.
>
>
> Sri Lanka had a robust Trotskyist movement in it's day, and it's had an
> effect, with a greater public health system than in most nations of similar
> income level. We could say similar things about the Indian state of Kerela.
> But, again, the differences are not astounding. As a matter of fact, those
> examples demonstrate that the issue is more of how much a country invests in
> health and education rather than the class composition of the state itself.
> A regime that fears a socialist revolution can achieve similar results to a
> regime produced out of a socialist revolution, so maybe John Holloway is
> right.
>
>
> As for the issue of what constitutes an improvement in living standards, I
> take as relevant things like health (as measured by life span, mortality
> rates, rates of vaccination, etc.), education levels (like literacy or years
> of schooling), access to housing, consumer goods, and so on. By a few
> standards, Americans are stagnating, but by and large, there's still a slow
> improvement. We should seek to expand it, however, not deny it's existence.
>
>
>
>
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