Historical analysis of the Great Depression and capitalism as dependent on rate of profit. Compares a Marxian analysis with a Keynesian one.
Michael Roberts Blog | blogging from a marxist economist
The Great Depression and the war
Michael Roberts
(h/t Clonal via email)
3 comments:
Interesting thesis but neglects all sorts of moving parts of the wartime economy.
To name just a couple, his profit margin numbers can't be calculated based on book value of corporate assets because much of the industrial stock of the wartime economy was actually govt-owned (no private company would build a tank factory that'd pay for itself in, say, 10 years for a war that clearly wouldn't last half that long).
On the other side of the ledger, those very high profits were subject to tough excess profits tax (Bill Vickrey's cap and trade market anti-inflation plan was iteration of an excess profits tax, albeit on value added instead of earnings). Post-tax profits were rather lower, to say nothing of the dividends which were and are also taxed at the individual level.
beowulf, you should raise that point in the comments; in my experience Roberts is pretty receptive to critical input.
He gives me a headache. Guess you can say most anything in a post. He needs to do a much better job of explaining the foundations for this nonsense.
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