Hacker News: jwmhjwmh

Determinants of the profit rate and the trajectory of capitalist economies [pdf]

jwmhjwmh — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 17:18:47 +0000

Article URL: http://carecon.org.uk/QM/Papers/Zachariah_AverageProfitRate_v7.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34357078

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "Gen Z never learned to read cursive"

jwmhjwmh — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 11:58:43 +0000

I'm Gen Z and I learned cursive in elementary school. I've forgotten most of it, though.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "Low economic growth is a slow-burning crisis for Britain"

jwmhjwmh — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:37:13 +0000

If you automate everything, how is profit made? Say every firm charges a 5% markup above costs of materials and machine upkeep. A given firm must pay other firms' 5% markups on the materials it needs, making it cheaper for the firm to produce those materials itself. This tends toward complete centralization. There are two ways to fix this. The first is to have an economy based on many monopolies trading resources. This obviously suboptimal for economic calculation. The second way is to adopt a planned economy.

As labor productivity increases, profitability decreases, as historical data shows[1]. In the long term, this problem of capitalism cannot be avoided.

[1]: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-ra...

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?"

jwmhjwmh — Wed, 25 May 2022 02:42:58 +0000

The article is paywalled, so I'm just going by the title, but one thing holding back labor productivity is low wages. When wages are low, labor-saving technology is less likely to be cost-effective. It's funny when Hacker News' innovation-loving capitalists oppose minimum wages, since by doing so they are holding innovation back.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "The elitist philanthropy of so-called effective altruism (2013)"

jwmhjwmh — Fri, 06 May 2022 17:25:44 +0000

The increasing prevalence of "dead labor" (maybe another term for it is "fixed capital"?) depends on the changing processes of production. An example of the process is the switch from human-powered hoeing to animal-powered ploughing in agriculture (animals count as dead in this case, I guess.) Ploughing is more efficient, but requires more investment.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "The elitist philanthropy of so-called effective altruism (2013)"

jwmhjwmh — Fri, 06 May 2022 15:43:50 +0000

I think the orthodox Marxist position is that prices gravitate around labor values in a competitive market. The main reason for profit is that people can produce more value than is necessary to sustain themselves, so capitalists don't need to pay them for the all the value they produce. Some of the value produced becomes profit. It is true that the rate of profit falls over time, but I think this is because of increasing automation in the economy, increasing the proportion of dead labor to living labor. Capitalists have less and less living labor to profit from relative to their costs of production.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "The elitist philanthropy of so-called effective altruism (2013)"

jwmhjwmh — Fri, 06 May 2022 14:38:04 +0000

Specifically, profit made selling goods at their equilibrium price is made by exploiting workers. If you introduce a new good, you will have a monopoly on it for a time, meaning you could turn a profit selling it without exploiting your workers, theoretically. That's my understanding, at least.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "In Chicago, Wealthy Neighborhoods Hire Their Own Private Police as Crime Rises"

jwmhjwmh — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 20:13:13 +0000

Privatizing the police seems like a bad idea. For one thing, it exacerbates inequality between those who can pay for security and those who cannot (or can only pay for inferior service.) If private security becomes the go-to for the well-off, who have a very disproportionate say in society, they will stop caring about universally-provided security of the police, and will let the institution wither, increasing inequality further. Inequality is bad for the cohesion of society.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "Open Golf: A cross-platform minigolf game written in C"

jwmhjwmh — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 00:51:35 +0000

After many tries, I finished level 12 in one stroke.

It would be nice to be able to skip the starting animation.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "Firefox removed Yandex search option"

jwmhjwmh — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 21:51:07 +0000

> Comparing what Russia is doing in Ukraine to anything the US has done in the last 100 years is an exercise in false equivalence. One so blatant that it defies any attempt to interpret in good faith.

Are you fucking kidding me? Are you completely ignorant of history? What about Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq?

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "Burkina Faso: Another Coup Led by U.S.-Trained Soldier"

jwmhjwmh — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 13:45:36 +0000

There were two other coups in the years leading up to Sankara's taking power, so I wouldn't say that the country was exactly in a stable state.

I don't think the problem is the lack of training in democracy. I think the problem is the powerful forces opposed to democracy. When he assassinated Sankara, Blaise Compaoré represented the interests of imperialists.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "Burkina Faso: Another Coup Led by U.S.-Trained Soldier"

jwmhjwmh — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 16:33:50 +0000

I believe Burkina Faso did very well under Thomas Sankara, whether or not you want to call him a "strongman". He definitely was not aligned with the West. In fact, he had close relations with Cuba.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "Chimpanzees observed applying and giving medicine"

jwmhjwmh — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 14:34:09 +0000

Apparently a mother was seen applying an insect to her child. I doubt she would purposefully poison her own offspring.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "Namecheap: Russia Service Termination"

jwmhjwmh — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 01:03:55 +0000

> You can mess around in the garden (overseas) as much as you want, as long as you keep the house clean.

> That’s not fair, but it is consistent.

I guess xanaxagoras was just assuming that the CEO of Namecheap had basic human decency.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "High medical bill in the ER leaves family reeling"

jwmhjwmh — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 22:28:35 +0000

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-2415

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "High medical bill in the ER leaves family reeling"

jwmhjwmh — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 15:36:35 +0000

Other people who have also taken time to study how the system works will tell you that it is the issue.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman"

jwmhjwmh — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 21:41:25 +0000

Jimmy Carter did some bad stuff too. From his Wikipedia page:

> During Carter's presidency, the U.S. continued to support Indonesia as a cold war ally, in spite of human rights violations in East Timor. The violations followed Indonesia's December 1975 invasion and occupation of East Timor. It did so even though antithetical to Carter's stated policy "of not selling weapons if it would exacerbate a potential conflict in a region of the world."

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "Bird populations declining fast across North America"

jwmhjwmh — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 22:20:55 +0000

Very well. Let me just say that any large company involves humans telling other humans what to do, even if the workers work there "voluntarily". Many people have no choice but to work for such companies.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "Bird populations declining fast across North America"

jwmhjwmh — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 15:33:24 +0000

I'm not an economist either. It just seems the business cycle has been a persistent feature of capitalist economies.

New comment by jwmhjwmh in "Bird populations declining fast across North America"

jwmhjwmh — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 06:17:01 +0000

> central planning does not fix those deficiencies, it makes them worse

How would the system I'm describing make inequality and the resulting conflict worse?

> you have to count the communication between the nodes as part of the computation.

But surely the nodes themselves must be the ones to perform the physical computation in the end? If the computing power of distributed systems scales exponentially with the number of nodes, why doesn't the computing power of a supercomputer scale exponentially with its number of cores?

> Every time socialism fails, socialist ideologues say it's because it wasn't true socialism.

Don't be ridiculous. There are plenty of countries with much better safety nets than the U.S. The U.S. government is just especially dysfunctional.

> I am not saying that governments never do beneficial things. I am saying that governments, on net, will do worse than a free market would do.

I guess we just disagree about this.

> in many situations there may simply be no way of achieving an optimal result

If you take "optimal result" to mean "best possible result," then there is, by definition, always a way of achieving an optimal result.