Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

by Joseph Joyce Will A Rise in Interest Rates Lead to a New Debt Crisis? The question of when the Federal Reserve will begin to reverse its loose policy stance continues to be a topic of widespread speculation. At last month’s meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, its members showed a willingness to cut back on asset purchases in 2022 and to raise interest rates in 2023 but kept monetary policy on its current setting due to slower...

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time: TSV part 3, chapter 20 Marx’s discussion of socially necessary labour time in Chapter 20 of Theories of Surplus Value is notable for the fact that it comes immediately before Chapter 21, where he doesn’t mention socially necessary labour time (but the concept lingers just below the surface in the latter chapter). He talked about how piece-work is actually a kind of time work in which the piece rate is set according...

by David Zetland Why we’re failing to stop climate chaos Climate chaos (CC) is the largest threat to our collective prosperity. (Water scarcity, biodiversity loss, increasing vulnerability to viruses and bacteria are a few more.) But “we” (citizens of rich countries) are having a hardER time understanding and addressing CC due to a few strategic mistakes, i.e., Most discussions of impacts focus on 2100, which is too far away from our time...

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time IV: TSV part 2, chapters 8, 9, 16, and 17 Nothing notable in these chapters. Chapter 8: Poor quality land requires more labour time than socially necessary (which is to say the average labour time required to produce a given output). Chapter 9: Socially necessary labour time is permanently established in nature, in industry it is constantly disappearing. Chapter 16: The value of labour is established by the...

Topical thread Unemployment is socially necessary. Tags: Disposable Industrial Reserve Army

US crude supplies falling at a record pace, down 17.4% YoY; gasoline output at a 22 month high; record gasoline demand The Latest US Oil Supply and Disposition Data from the EIA, RJS, Marketwatch 666 US oil data from the US Energy Information Administration for the week ending July 2nd showed that even after a sizeble decrease in our oil exports and a modest decrease in our refinery throughput, we still needed to withdraw oil from our stored...

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time III: Theories of Surplus Value, chapter 7 and addenda to part 1 In an earlier post, I mentioned that in chapter seven of TSV Marx explicitly excluded William Godwin from his historical review of theories of surplus value: In accordance with the plan of my work socialist and communist writers are entirely excluded from the historical reviews. These reviews are only intended to show on the one hand in what form the...

This post will be a bit of a backtrack. While going through my notes for chapter 7 of Theories of Surplus Value, I discovered a printout of a page from the Grundrisse that I had overlooked when writing the post on that book. Although it does not contain the term socially necessary labour time, the two and a half page section with the same title as this post speaks volumes about the concept. First, a little context: the section follows discussions...

Utah and Beyond Tuesday, June 29, 2021: The small town of Lytton, British Columbia, Canada recorded a high of 121 degrees Fahrenheit. This was the highest ever recorded in Lytton, in British Columbia, in Canada. Wednesday, June 30, 2021, the small town of Lytton burned to the ground. On Monday, June 28, 2021, the temperature in Portland, Oregon reached 116 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest ever recorded. On that same day, Seattle recorded 108...

On The Centennial Of The Chinese Communist Party, EconoSpeak, Barkley Rosser July 1, 2021 is now over in China but for a few more moments it is still the centennial of the CCP where I am.  Just a couple of observations.  This is partly driven by seeing multiple posts on Econbrowser by “ltr” praising the CCP and not allowing for even a hint of crirticism. So indeed there is much to praise in the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) today, with...