Re: [gang8] Dollar Hegemony Revisited

["Barkley Rosser" <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

     I would say that the greater income equality
in Japan reflects its much more egalitarian
wage and salary structure within firms than
we find in the US, which in turn reflects the nature
of its once-praised Japanese management system
and related socio-cultural-economic approaches
compared with the US.  I would remind that the
ratio of the "salary" of a US CEO to that of an average
assembly line worker in a US company has risen
by something like tenfold in the last 15 years or so.
I don't think Japan's bilateral trade surplus with the
US has very much to do with this development.
     Of course for much of the 1990s people in the
US were praising our management system compared
to the Japanese.  This praise looks a lot more hollow
since the Enron and related corporate scandals.
Barkley Rosser
----- Original Message -----
From: "John M. Legge" <jlegge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, July 07, 2003 7:54 PM
Subject: Re: [gang8] Dollar Hegemony Revisited


> Two things need to be recalled:
> a) Japan is able to maintain a large, high wage (in their context)
> manufacturing sector and a relatively egalitarian income distribution by
> exporting two million cars per year etc to the USA.  As James Galbraith
> points out, the US, in sacrificing its manufacturing sector (Galbraith's
> C-sector) the US has become a less equal society.  Hutton claims that the
US
> is now one of the most unequal and least upwardly mobile societies in the
> OECD. There may have been (many on this list could suggest some) policies
> that would have made Japan even better off, but these have been rendered
> invisible by the fog of neoclassical and neoliberal economic dogma.
> b) To the extent that the Japanese people need a justification for the
> sacrifice of domestic living standards (while causing the slow social
> disintegration of the USA- is this reparations?) in order to maintain an
> export surplus they have been told that they have acquired a mountain of
> valuable US dollar assets. Warren seems to assert that these dollar assets
> are pure mirage and that Japanese claims on US production will be
repudiated
> the day they cause political or economic embarrassment to a US
> administration.  Of course, we already have the neocons arguing that some
> debts are 'odious' and can be repudiated. For the time being odious debts
> are defined as money owed to countries that didn't support Bush's war in
> Iraq, but it is a small step to expand the concept to money owed by the
US,
>
> JML
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: pkt-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pkt-owner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On
> > Behalf Of Warren Mosler
> > Sent: Tuesday, 8 July 2003 7:43 AM
> > <snip>
> >
> > Also, the US is to be congratulated for its trade
> > deficit- quite an achievement!!!  I call it the
> > biggest case of war reparations in history.  Heck,
> > Japan still net sends us 2 million cars per year
> > after.  The Roman emperors would be in awe of $500
> > billion annual tribute, not to mention getting it done
> > voluntarily, without enforcement costs, as the rest of
> > the world truly thinks it's winning!!!
> >
> > warren
> > <pins>
>
>