Re: (OPE-L) Re: an empirical question re socialism

[Paul Cockshott <wpc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

gerald_a_levy wrote:

It occurs to me now that an even simpler way toget rough estimates for this would be tocalculate:          global GNP     ------------------------     global population and:        global wealth    -------------------------    global population The latter figure might be more useful but statisticson national wealth are more difficult to obtain thanstatistics on national income. I recognize that there are problems with GDPincluding not taking into account most goods andservices that are not for sale,  ignoring theunderground economy,  and not taking intoaccount external costs, but these problemswouldn't make the statistics meaningless as allthat one would want for the purposes at hand isa rough estimate.  Alternatively, one could tryto adjust GDP figures to account for theseproblems if one views them as statisticallysignificant -- which some of them, e.g. theunderground economy, probably are. After one had these numbers then one could makeestimates about what goods and services a globalsocialist society could afford to provide for its citizensgiven whatever the current state of the productive forcesis. Okay,  the above is probably too simple.  Please explainwhy. In solidarity, Jerry

There might be problems with this as not all the activities
listed in gdp would be productive labour that would
continue under socialism.

On the other hand, the labour could in principle be
transfered to other activities without changing the
magnitude of GDP greatly, so you would not be
far out.

-- 
Paul Cockshott
Dept Computing Science
University of Glasgow



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