Re: the profit rate & recession

[Bill Burgess <burgess@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, I did find your talk interesting. Do you have any similar numbers for
other countries, or when you compare your trends for the US with profit
trends in other countries, what are the differences?

I generally agree with your focus on fixed capital and using 'conventional'
profits rates, but I also wonder if something important is not being missed
when circulating constant capital (raw materials and other
non-fixed-capital inputs) is left out of the analysis of the reasons for
the trends, especially about the role of the organic composition of
capital. If  I remember correctly, Fred Mosely also leaves out circulating
constant capital from his profit rate. Several questions come to mind.

My impression from the business press is that faster throughput and
reducing waste in transforming materials have been a key element of
productivity changes in recent years. This element of change in the organic
composition of capital is ignored when the profit trends are expressed as
yearly profits over the stock of fixed capital alone.

A useful series by the US  Federal Reserve (see
www.federalreserve.gov/releases/G17/ip_notes.htm) shows that more than half
of industry (roughly manufacturing and mining) value-added is accounted for
by materials and intermediate goods, as opposed to final goods. The
materials share of total industry value-added has been rising. This
breakdown of industry by the stage of production underlines the
*quantitative* significance of circulating constant capital. Or, am I
misunderstanding something?

Subcontracted inputs have become more important. While I suppose that in
principle the accounting in separate business units should not affect the
aggregate shares of fixed capital, profits, etc., I wonder if this is
really is true. For example, is subcontracting an important vehicle for
transfering profit from subcontracters to their oligopolistic customers.
Even if the overal capital-output ratio does not change, who gets the
profits does change, through unequal exchange. Also, is it prossible that
more subconstractors means that more profit is taken in the form of profits
rather than big salaries for managers?

As we all know, measures of fixed capital are always a problem. In a
comparison of productivity trends in US and Canadian manufacturing, Andrew
Sharpe of the Centre for the Study of Living Standards
(http://www.csls.ca/pdf/lanc.pdf) notes that all of the 1990-1997 increase
in US manufacturing productivity (and almost all of the difference between
Canada and the US) is concentrated in industrial machinery and electronic
equipment sectors alone. He seems to question how accurate the US data is,
but more to the point here, the boom in this sector suggests that a lot of
machinery and computers has been scrapped and replaced with the latests and
greatest, but probably before passing on its value. You note the decline in
K/Y is related to the shake-out in manufacturing but, for example, while
computer prices have declined massively, the fixed capital numbers may not
reflect their service life. Another question - how much of computer-type
purchases are counted as fixed capital?

Bill Burgess




 At 11:34 AM 27/12/01 -0800, you wrote:
> For those interested, I recently gave a talk at the Marxist School in
> Sacramento, California, suggesting that the recent recession is connected
> with the trend rise of the rate of profit. My notes are available at:
> http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/faculty/jdevine/FROP/sacramento.htm
>
> Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine