Tag Archives: surplus value

As is well known, Marx and the classical political economists before him made a distinction between productive and unproductive labor. Marx’s distinction is somewhat differed from Smith’s. For Marx, labor is productive when it is: (i) directly productive of surplus value; and (ii) exchanged directly against capital. I remain unsure how applicable the distinction is to a state money system. Some of my misgivings are explained in an earlier post. The uncertainty has held back an attempt to...

There is no problem with scarcity — there is a problem with humanity’s social organization and with its institutions. There is no failure in our production of economic values — even now they are being produced to abundance (maybe even over-abundance). The math above shows that, if it could be allowed, this country can afford to pay a wage just shy of $100 to every human being who is willing to work. It is only the obscenely wealthy whom we stretch and strain to afford… Economic rent.John...

First there was the Great Gatsby curve. Then there was the Proust index. Now, thanks to Neil Irwin, we have the Marx ratio. Each, in their different way, attempts to capture the ravages of contemporary capitalism. But the Marx ratio is a bit different. It was published in the New York Times. Its aim is to capture one of the underlying determinants of the obscene levels of inequality in the United States today—not class mobility or the number of years of national income growth lost to the...

Mainstream economists refer to it as price theory, everyone else value theory. But whatever it’s called, it’s at the center of economists’ differing explanations of what happens in (and alongside) markets. As I see it, price/value theory serves as the framework to explain a wide range of phenomena, from how and for how much commodities are exchanged in markets through the determinants of the distribution of incomes to the outcomes—for the economy and society as a whole—of the allocation of...