Re: Eurocentrism once again

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At the time that Lewis was writing, capital was not nearly as mobile,
sometimes allowing workers to take advantage of local labor shortages.
Now it is relatively easy to move the jobs to the labor surplus regions.

Brad DeLong wrote:

> >Max Sawicky wrote:
> >
> >>Seems to me Doug's question is what is the
> >>effect of the extra X on the growth rate.
> >
> >No, I'm not that vulgar, claims to the contrary. I was looking for
> >some kind of qualitative and quantitative account of the
> >contribution of imperialism to the maintenance of First World
> >wealth. Is it something that's constantly renewed every day, or is
> >it mainly the inheritance from an earlier colonialism? I got flamed
> >for saying this once, but the poorest countries in the world are
> >poor mainly because they're excluded from value production, not
> >because they get the short end of it. What do the 1.2 billion people
> >who live on $1/day contribute to our $25,000 per capita DPIs?
> >
> >Doug
>
> Arthur Lewis would say that a century ago the potential competition
> in the labor market from the people who lived on $1 a day kept wages
> in the tea plantations of Ceylon, the rubber plantations of Malaya,
> and the coffee-growing regions of Java and Brazil low, and so kept
> the prices of "tropical" consumption goods imported into the first
> world low as well.
>
> But World War I brought an end to the era of free and open migration
> within the periphery. So it's very hard to figure out any impact
> today.
>
> Go back further in time and you get big proportional numbers. Britain
> spent about 2% of GDP importing cotton from the U.S. in the first
> half of the nineteenth century. Getting the same cotton from India or
> from Egypt would have cost perhaps three times as much--so 4% of
> British GDP in 1840 can be thought of as surplus value extracted from
> American slaves. Of course, almost all of that surplus was then
> distributed to the consumers of British machine-spun and -woven
> textiles--British workers, Dutch peasants, Indian merchants, and so
> on. Figuring out the true incidence is very hard...
>
> Brad DeLong

--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx