[lbo-talk] An Orgy of Speculation?

[Peter Fay]

Sorry, guys, I have no knowledge nor interest in who sued whom, who's on the
in's or out's with URPE, etc.  I just want to know the facts.  Not being an
expert, I have reviewed a number of analyses of the rate of profit in the
US, and Kliman's doesn't seem particularly different from many of the
others:
Chris Harman, 2010 - http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=613 :
"aggregating the different investments made at different times in a
particular period is a necessarily complicated procedure, and most attempts
to measure national rates of profit use a different procedure—that of
current cost accounting. The profit made in a given year is measured against
the market value (ie the replacement cost) of the structures and equipment
used. This necessarily leads to a distortion in the figures since any
increase in productivity since the investment was made will mean that its
current market value is less than what was laid out on it: the rate of
profit will appear higher than it actually was.
[...]
"Andrew Kliman has attempted to provide figures that eliminate both sorts of
distortion, using historic cost calculations that attempt to remove the
effect of inflation.17 <http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=613#125husson_17> The
overall pattern of his graphs is not completely dissimilar to that of
Brenner, Mohun and Moseley—except that they show a much smaller recovery of
profitability from the low point of the early 1980s"

Brenner seems to show roughly the same conclusions as the others - rate of
profit never recovered...

Brenner, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0sg0782h.pdf :
"Even as the millennium drew to a close, the rates of profit for both the
manufacturing sectors and the total private economies of the US, Japan, and
Germany, as well as Korea, were not close to regaining their former levels,
and, despite much hype and misinformation to the contrary, they failed to do
so during the current business cycle right up to the present."

Does anyone have anything to say these are incorrect? That is, concrete
facts, tables, charts rather than simply saying one needs one's 'head
examined'?  What I'm seeing is conclusions from various Marxist economists
based on US Bureau of Economic Affairs NIPA tables which seem fairly
reasoned.

Peter Fay
http://theclearview.wordpress.com

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 2:01 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


>
> On Mar 5, 2011, at 1:54 PM, SA wrote:
>
> > On 3/5/2011 1:38 PM, Peter Fay wrote:
> >
> >> Not to rain on this parade, but did profitability really rise 1982-97?
> >>  Andrew Kliman argues nominal rates rose then, but profit rates adjusted
> to
> >> money prices, etc. show a continual decline(hope he doesn't mind me
> quoting
> >> his rough draft - "Value and Crisis: Bichler&  Nitzan versus Marx"):
> >
> > Kliman has also done interesting work on the sociology of knowledge:
> http://akliman.squarespace.com/stop-character-assassination/
>
> He also sued URPE because its journal rejected a paper he submitted.
>
> Doug
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