RE: Re: workers' saving & Marxian political economy

["Forstater, Mathew" <ForstaterM@xxxxxxxx>]

The idea that the classical/Marxian assumption that workers don't save
(and capitalists live on air) implies that working people are
'impatient' or whatever suffers from quite a few problems:

1) the assumption is a macro assumption--it says that in the aggregate
workers don't save.  This is completely consistent with some individual
workers saving and some dissaving, right?;

2) it is a first approximation assumption.  Many have gone on to the
next level of analysis and assumed that there is worker saving and that
capitalists consume, and is doesn't effect the results greatly;

3) it is not even that unrealistic assumption, when we recall that
savings are primarily business retained earnings (if we don't count
mortgages);

4) it buys in too much to the neoclassical notion of saving as
'prudence' 'thrift' and all the whole 'time preference' crap.  The
primary justification for the assumption that workers do not save in the
classical/Marxian tradition is that they do not earn incomes high enough
to pay for their necessaries and still have anything left over.  If you
do not earn income high enough to live, than there is no 'choice'
involved in dividing your income between consumption and savings.

5) the assumption that capitalists live on air is also justifiable if we
think of it in another way.  What we are saying when we make that
assumption is that capitalist consumption does not fluctuate when
profits go up or down by relatively small amounts.  Capitalists have
various means of maintaining consumption levels when profits fall.