Arbeidsproductiviteit als leugen

[Henk Vreekamp]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Ik vind het prima dat je er van alles bijhaalt, Mark, maar dat ondermijnt
mijn bericht allerminst.

Overigens lees ik natuurlijk graag Krugman, Ricardo etc.

Even een zijpad van mijn kant: waarom is iemand die zo kritisch staat/stond
tegenover zoiets als ZBO's zo voorzichtig" rond de neolib? Ben je bang voor
"socialist" te worden uitgemaakt, daar in het verre Westen?

hv,u
------

At 09:49 17-9-04 -0700, you wrote:
>REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>
>
>Uit: RICARDO'S DIFFICULT IDEA, Paul Krugman, 1996
>http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm
>
>De onderstaande passage uit Krugman's paper is wel interessant voor de
>discussie. NIet zozeer vanwege de controversie over de
>productiviteitsgroei, maar veeleer vanwege de case die Krugman maakt dat
>het wel heel eenvoudig en verleidelijk is (verkoopt goed) om
>statistische gegevens over de economie vooringenomen te intepreteren.
>
>Groeten,
>Mark
>
>2. The cult of the new
>
>One of America's new intellectual stars is a young writer named Michael
>Lind, whose contrarian essays on politics have given him a reputation as
>a brilliant enfant terrible. In 1994 Lind published an article in
>Harper's about international trade, which contained the following
>remarkable passage:
>
>"Many advocates of free trade claim that higher productivity growth in
>the United States will offset pressure on wages caused by the global
>sweatshop economy, but the appealing theory falls victim to an
>unpleasant fact. Productivity has been going up, without resulting wage
>gains for American workers. Between 1977 and 1992, the average
>productivity of American workers increased by more than 30 percent,
>while the average real wage fell by 13 percent. The logic is
>inescapable. No matter how much productivity increases, wages will fall
>if there is an abundance of workers competing for a scarcity of jobs --
>an abundance of the sort created by the globalization of the labor pool
>for US-based corporations." (Lind 1994: )
>
>What is so remarkable about this passage? It is certainly a very abrupt,
>confident rejection of the case for free trade; it is also noticeable
>that the passage could almost have come out of a campaign speech by
>Patrick Buchanan. But the really striking thing, if you are an economist
>with any familiarity with this area, is that when Lind writes about how
>the beautiful theory of free trade is refuted by an unpleasant fact, the
>fact he cites is completely untrue.
>
>More specifically: the 30 percent productivity increase he cites was
>achieved only in the manufacturing sector; in the business sector as a
>whole the increase was only 13 percent. The 13 percent decline in real
>wages was true only for production workers, and ignores the increase in
>their benefits: total compensation of the average worker actually rose 2
>percent. And even that remaining gap turns out to be a statistical
>quirk: it is entirely due to a difference in the price indexes used to
>deflate business output and consumption (probably reflecting
>overstatement of both productivity growth and consumer price inflation).
>When the same price index is used, the increases in productivity and
>compensation have been almost exactly equal. But then how could it be
>otherwise? Any difference in the rates of growth of productivity and
>compensation would necessarily show up as a fall in labor's share of
>national income -- and as everyone who is even slightly familiar with
>the numbers knows, the share of compensation in U.S. national income has
>been quite stable in recent decades, and actually rose slightly over the
>period Lind describes.
>
>The question here is not why Lind got these numbers wrong. It takes
>considerable experience to know where to look and what to worry about in
>economic statistics, and one should not expect someone who does not work
>in the field to be able to get it right without some guidance. The
>question is, instead, why Mr. Lind felt that it was a good idea to make
>sweeping pronouncements about this subject, when he clearly was
>unwilling to invest time and energy in actually understanding it. The
>short answer in this case is surely that Mr. Lind, who is always looking
>for ways to enhance his enfant terrible status, saw this as a perfect
>opportunity. Free trade is a sacred cow of economists, who are
>well-known to be boring, stuffy types; what could be a better way to
>reinforce one's credentials as a radical, innovative thinker than to
>skewer their most beloved doctrine? (It seems not to have occurred to
>him that there might be a reason other than ideological rigidity that
>the striking fact he thought he knew has not been noticed by
>economists).
>
>This is a fairly extreme case, but by no means unique. Modern
>intellectuals are supposed to be daring innovators, not respecters of
>tradition. As any publisher will tell you, books about startling new
>scientific discoveries always sell better than books about known areas
>of science, even though the things science already knows are in many
>ways stranger than any of the speculations in the latest cosmological
>best-seller. Old ideas are viewed as boring, even if few people have
>heard of them; new ideas, even if they are probably wrong and not
>terribly important, are far more attractive. And books that say (or seem
>to say) that the experts have all been wrong are far more likely to
>attract a wide audience than books that explain why the experts are
>probably right. Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life (Gould 1989) which to
>many readers seemed to say that recent discoveries refute Darwinian
>orthodoxy, attracted far more attention than Richard Dawkins' equally
>well-written The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins 1986), which explained the
>astonishing implications of that orthodoxy. (See Dennett for an
>eye-opening discussion of Gould). Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New
>Mind, which rejects the possibility of explaining intelligence in terms
>of computational processes, attracted far more attention than any of the
>exciting discoveries of cognitive scientists who are actually trying to
>understand the nature of intelligence.
>
>The same principle applies to international economics. Comparative
>advantage is an old idea; intellectuals who want to read about
>international trade want to hear radical new ideas, not boring old
>doctrines, even if they are quite blurry about what those doctrines
>actually say. Robert Reich, now Secretary of Labor, understood this
>point perfectly when he wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs entitled
>"Beyond free trade". (Reich 1983). The article received wide attention,
>even though it was fairly unclear exactly how Reich proposed to go
>beyond free trade (there is a certain similarity between Reich and Gould
>in this respect: they make a great show of offering new ideas, but it is
>quite hard to pin down just what those new ideas really are). The great
>selling point was, clearly, the article's title: free trade is old hat,
>it is something we must go beyond. In this sort of intellectual
>environment, it is quite hard to get anyone other than an economics
>student to sit still for an explanation of the concept of comparative
>advantage. Just imagine trying to tell an ambitious, energetic,
>forward-looking intellectual who is interested in economics -- William
>Jefferson Clinton comes to mind -- that before he can start talking
>knowledgeably about globalization and the information economy he must
>wrap his mind around a difficult concept that was devised by a
>frock-coated banker 180 years ago!
>
>
><-----Original Message----->
> >From: Mark Giebels
> >Sent: 9/17/2004 9:26:18 AM
> >To: vreekamp at knoware.nl;D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
> >Subject: Re: Arbeidsproductiviteit als leugen
> >
> >REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
> >
> >
> ><-----Original Message----->
> >>From: Henk Vreekamp
> >
> >Beste Henk,
> >
> >Laat ik eerst zeggen dat ik absoluut niet de Amerikaanse vorm van het
> >kapitalisme wil verdedigen, maar gelijkertijd is het door jou
> >aangedragen rapport natuurlijk wel erg eenzijdig. Je hebt de
> >neo-liberale propagandamachine (en die is zeker sterk), maar je hebt
>ook
> >
>
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