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Also, consider running your analysis with no interpolation, and see how your results compare to those with interpolation. If there is a big difference, then the interpolation needs a lot of justification.
Hi Adam,
Interpolation always involves guesswork. But as a rule, the simplest approach is probably best … unless you have a compelling reason for using more complicated interpolation. So yes, I’d use linear interpolation.
I think both Chris and I get that definition of ‘markup’ from Jonathan Nitzan’s class. We can quibble with names (some people call profit/sales the ‘profit margin’) but I think the metric itself is unquestioningly of value. That does not mean we shouldn’t explore other metrics.
About the offset fiscal years, that does seem to raise issues, especially if you are interested in comparing data for a specific year. But as the time frame of analysis expands, I think these minor accounting differences are not that important.
We are beholden to the data that is reported, and the accounting quirks on which it is based. But since you raise the question, now you make me think about how other databases treat fiscal years. I’ve never looked to see if Compustat reports the dates covered by each company’s fiscal year. Something to think about, especially when doing fine grain analysis.
Very interesting, James. I look forward to digging into this data. It would have been nice to have for Chris Mouré’s new paper on the Google-Microsoft patent war.
Mouré, ‘Soft-wars: A Capital-as-Power Analysis of Google’s Differential Power Trajectory’
I just finished reading Stephen Jay Gould’s book ‘Full House’. I always find Gould interesting, if a bit pretentious and long winded.
Thanks, Jonathan and Shimshon, for this entry into the debate. Two quick thoughts come to mind.
The first is a question: who receives ‘federal transfers’, and how has this distribution changed overtime?
Second, I think that one area where CASP analysis is lacking is in cross-country comparison. We know that the US is a business dominated society. But what of other countries? I’d be interested to know how the power of dominant capital relates to metrics of social well-being across countries.
This is part of a wider project that James McMahon and I are trying to get off the ground. We want to generalize CASP analysis to a big sample of countries to see what we can conclude, in general, about ‘sabotage’. So far James is doing the heavy lifting of compiling the data.
On that front, it would be nice to have something similar to the SESHAT project, but for capital as power — a sprawling database that researchers can use to test CASP ideas.
Anyway, thanks for these ideas. And a reminder to FORUM users. Tonight at 8pm, we will be pausing the forum so that we can transfer capitalaspower.com to a better server.
Thank you for the detailed review, Rowan. I’m glad this essay is getting the attention it deserves. And I definitely agree with James about writing up something formal for RECASP.
I think part of the appeal of Marx is his unreserved boldness. Simply put, he is brilliant at formulating convincing rhetoric.
Case in point, his claim: “We proceed from an actual economic fact.”
It’s just a brilliant way of silencing critics, and along the way, convincing the reader that Marx is going to describe real evidence. But then he goes on to describe a hypothesis — that workers are (and will) becoming poorer at the same time that society is becoming wealthier.
Sometimes I dream of rewriting Capital such that all of Marx’s ideas are framed as tentative hypotheses. My feeling is that had Marx written such a text, it would now be lost to history, since it would be obvious to modern readers that the ideas were wrong.
I’ve removed the minimum word count.
Hi Steve,
The word counts are just guidelines. Actually, I see no reason to have a minimum. So feel free to submit a paper that is brief!
Brian,
About the Keynesian critiques of degrowth (and others critiques by prominent heterodox economists like Branko Milanović), my impression is that they are based on the observation that the growth of real GDP correlates strongly with many measures of well-being. The problem is that they take this correlation and then (essentially) claim that GDP growth is the same as improving wellbeing.
At a more fundamental level, virtually all macroeconomists are taught to think in aggregate terms. At that level, the idea of ‘growth’ (or lack thereof) is simple. If GDP goes up, the economy grew. But things get more complex when we are trying to design an economy that is sustainable and one in which humans can flourish.
On that point, I think the ideas from Doughnut economics get it right, in the sense that they look at disagregated measures of resource use and of wellbeing. When you do that, it’s not even clear what ‘growth’ or ‘degrowth’ means.
Interestingly, I’ve been having an email conversation with Jason Hickel on this topic. I think the most important thing for degrowthers to achieve is to take the focus off GDP. GDP growth (or decline) just doesn’t matter.
If you have specific objectives for human well-being (improving life expectancy, infant mortality, education, etc.) you should focus on those directly. And if you have specific objectives for things you want to reduce (carbon emissions, fossil fuel consumption, etc.) focus on those directly.
What you see immediately is that there are a lot of messy trade offs. Some of the good things might go up. But some might go down. Likewise with the bad things. It’s a matter of democracy to decide how to weight these various trade offs.
For a century, politicians have had it easy. Their answer to society’s problems was basically ‘lets have more of everything’. Well, going forward that won’t be an option.
To answer your specific questions, it is true that lower earners spend more of their money directly on consumer goods. But I’m not sure that you can tie a specific portion of ‘resource consumption’ onto a specific class. How, for instance, do you allot the ‘consumption’ embodied in the construction of roads and freeways? Or skyscrapers?
About the confusion between ‘real’ and ‘nominal’, I think the confusion persists because money is easy to measure. That’s its purpose — to have a quantity. The world of resource use, however, is not so easily quantified. Well, that’s not quite true. There are many ways of measuring biophysical flows, but each has a different purpose and meaning.
To end with the big picture, I have almost no faith that humanity will voluntarily reduce its resource consumption. But I still think degrowth is a good idea because it gets us thinking about what we’ll be forced to do in the long term.
Fascinating, Jonathan. It still blows my mind that we allow chemical compounds to be put under intellectual property. Imagine if Marie Curie had patented the formula for Radium. Or worse still, if Dmitri Mendeleev had patented the formula for the periodic table. It would be absurd … and yet drug companies have convinced us that they should have the this right.
