boom boom boom posted:

No, those are stupid as poo poo. Britain spends millions to keep a gross family of racists in the lap of luxury. And if you ask why they'll be all, "they bring in tourist dollars" because god knows no one on earth would ever go visit a castle if there wasn't a mean looking old lady living in it, that's why the Louvre was knocked down and turned into a parking lot for abandoned cars decades ago.

I mean an actual, proper monarchy.

dex_sda posted:

The sale of royal merch brings in a net profit to England dude

edit: also the louvre contains one of the biggest collections of art on earth. Most of the castles that get visited because of the royal family don't, yet they still get visited

boom boom boom posted:

Britain has no art?

boom boom boom posted:

Britain has no art?

dex_sda posted:

The sale of royal merch brings in a net profit to England dude

edit: also the louvre contains one of the biggest collections of art on earth. Most of the castles that get visited because of the royal family don't, yet they still get visited

dex_sda posted:

That's clearly what my post said.

boom boom boom posted:

The French were able to turn a castle into a museum, couldn't the British do that? Or is the British art scene now reduced to just waiting for Banksy to do something?

boom boom boom posted:

The French were able to turn a castle into a museum, couldn't the British do that? Or is the British art scene now reduced to just waiting for Banksy to do something?

Cat Mattress posted:

"We need to be more competitive! Workers have to agree to have their wages and benefits slashed, there is no other way."
Meanwhile, in another country:
"Look at this country over there! They're slashing their wages! We have to be competitive and slash ours too!"
Back to the first country:
"They're slashing their wages even more than we slashed ours! How can we stay competitive? We've got to slash even more now! Slash slash slash slash slash slash slash!"
Back to the other country:
"Okay, just screw it, let's officially reestablish serfdom and slavery. It's the only way to stay competitive."

GaussianCopula posted:

Do you have any examples of this happening in the real world? My impression is that wages are far to sticky for this to work.

ReagaNOMNOMicks posted:

It happens on this planet you might have heard of it.

GaussianCopula posted:

It really doesn't, as this graph will show you:



If his description were accurate, the graph should point downward, which it doesn't.

GaussianCopula posted:

It really doesn't, as this graph will show you:



If his description were accurate, the graph should point downward, which it doesn't.

Friendly Humour posted:

Way to obliterate your own argument though lmao

Cat Mattress posted:

"We need to be more competitive! Workers have to agree to have their wages and benefits slashed, there is no other way."
Meanwhile, in another country:
"Look at this country over there! They're slashing their wages! We have to be competitive and slash ours too!"
Back to the first country:
"They're slashing their wages even more than we slashed ours! How can we stay competitive? We've got to slash even more now! Slash slash slash slash slash slash slash!"
Back to the other country:
"Okay, just screw it, let's officially reestablish serfdom and slavery. It's the only way to stay competitive."

gently caress competitiveness. The whole competitive buzzword is just a way to organize a social and environmental race to the bottom, as politicians will dutifully unravel all the progress that has been made since the 19th century so as to sink the entire continent to the level of a hellhole like China.

Meanwhile, 0.000001% of the population possesses half the world's wealth, but, you know, it's the bottom 90% who have to agree to becoming poorer in order to make sure that the top 1% can keep getting richer. Nevermind that by slashing the income of the people who actually loving need an income will result in greatly decreasing demand, which will cause the whole economy to go tits up, but hey, you know, what's good is being competitive by making sure poor people get poorer and rich people get richer and gently caress it when do we kill and eat all the rich yet

Competitiveness is the exact inverse of what should be done. What should be done is increasing minimum wage drastically and putting huge fuckoff import tariffs against all countries with a lesser minimum wage to force them to race up, instead of letting them force us to race down.

GaussianCopula posted:

His argument: Competitiveness can only be achieved by slashing worker compensation and this leads to a downward spiral in worker compensation

The graph shows: Worker compensation actually has increased over the last 14 year and competitiveness can be increased through labor productivity gains.


Now if you want to talk about the question how the gains of labor productivity increases should be distributed, that's a very different discussion.

quote:

Another reason why Mongiovi’s claim is preposterous is that Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the profit rate is certainly one of his most “basic propositions about how capitalism … develops through history.” Marx himself said it is. He wrote that this law is “in every respect the most important law of modern political economy” (Marx 1973:748). Yet the physicalist-simultaneist revisions of Marx’s theory, codified in the Okishio theorem, negate his law (see, e.g., Okishio 1961; Roemer 1981, Chs. 4-5). Whereas Marx (1981:347) held that “The profit rate does not fall because labour becomes less productive but rather because it becomes more productive,” the neo-Ricardian models of physicalism-simultaneism conclude that rising productivity must tend to raise the profit rate...

As I discussed above, Marx’s theory, as understood by the TSSI, gives answers – diametrically opposed to those given by physicalism-simultaneism – to such questions as “what is the effect of rising productivity on the profit rate?” and “what is the source of profit?” Does Mongiovi really want to suggest that these questions are trivial?

ronya posted:

kliman has a horse in the labour theory of value fight though, it's like his signature contribution to marxist economics

kliman (1992):


obviously, if this is the approach to be taken, then you do not want to be cornered arguing 1) that productivity has outpaced wages, and 2) that the 'gap' has gone to corporate profits or that corporate profits are at an all-time high. You would be implicitly conceding that Okishio was right, that the neoclassicals are right, that the wage should be set at the marginal product of labour (and hence why problems stem from its failure to do so).

GaussianCopula posted:

His argument: Competitiveness can only be achieved by slashing worker compensation and this leads to a downward spiral in worker compensation

The graph shows: Worker compensation actually has increased over the last 14 year and competitiveness can be increased through labor productivity gains.


Now if you want to talk about the question how the gains of labor productivity increases should be distributed, that's a very different discussion.

ronya posted:

ronya posted:

'factionalism' suggests that the disagreement is a matter of divergent aesthetics; I would say that the disagreement goes to the heart of whether either worldview has any validity at all.

... in that sense it is academic, yes most people just don't feel the epistemic responsibility

Friendly Humour posted:

And no, labour productivity increases are not a separate discussion. If the value of work done increases but workers don't see an increase in their real wages, they are being more exploited.

Shazback posted:

So you support vastly increasing the income of farmers then, since the work each one of them does today was done by a dozen or more farmhands three centuries ago, and their produce is of better quality too?

Of course, this would need to be supported by huge increase in food prices, but we'll ask have to give something to avoid exploiting them I guess?

Shazback posted:

So you support vastly increasing the income of farmers then, since the work each one of them does today was done by a dozen or more farmhands three centuries ago, and their produce is of better quality too?

Of course, this would need to be supported by huge increase in food prices, but we'll ask have to give something to avoid exploiting them I guess?

Shazback posted:

So you support vastly increasing the income of farmers then, since the work each one of them does today was done by a dozen or more farmhands three centuries ago, and their produce is of better quality too?

Of course, this would need to be supported by huge increase in food prices, but we'll ask have to give something to avoid exploiting them I guess?

ronya posted:

lower food prices, other things equal, is an increase in real wages; that's what the 'real' means

Brainiac Five posted:

Kliman's argument, (or at least the version he uses for laypeople) is that productivity has outpaced compensation growth, just not for workers as a whole, but due to increasing divergence within compensation generally. Or at least that's an implicit conclusion, in that he explicitly notes that relative stagnation is a consequence of increasing shares of total compensation going to executives and senior managers and so on.

I think another important part of the situation is that in real terms capital goods have gotten cheaper during this period as well, undergoing less inflation than the American economy as a whole.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

This is the Europe thread.