Kilman's rejection of Underconsumptist theories of the Crisis.

[caleb]

Long interview with Kliman here, and a little bit of Lou's Metal Machine Music

http://dietsoap.podomatic.com/entry/2013-10-31T00_15_22-07_00

 

[butchersapron]

Thanks.

 

[butchersapron]

New from Kliman (with another to come):

Are Corporations Really Hogging Workers’ Wages?

Here's the editors note for why they commission and ran this:

Editor’s note: Three weeks ago, at the recommendation of leading neo-Keynesian thinker Michael Hudson, I contacted Pace University economist Andrew Kliman with a question. I was preparing to write an article based on a figure published in the July 2011 issue of Mother Jones and I wanted verification by an expert. “Productivity has surged, but income and wages have stagnated for most Americans,” the article reported. “If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.”

Believing that it powerfully summed up the economic theft committed against American workers over the last four decades, I repeated this claim in print and conversation for two and a half years. But I can’t say it any longer with the same confidence. When I showed it to Kliman, he said I had been misinformed.

“The original source is probably the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which is one of the sources of ‘Productivity/income’ info listed at the bottom of the story,” he wrote to me in an email. “They do a lot of publicizing of the supposed growing gap between productivity growth and wage/compensation growth. I find their stuff on this very misleading.” He went on to say he had crunched the EPI’s numbers and discovered that the pay Mother Jones claimed was being kept from workers couldn’t possibly be given to them. If it was tried, he said, there would be nothing left for the corporations—that is, the shareholders, owners and others who receive income but play no role in production.

His confidence slowed me down. From policymakers and credentialed experts to committed activists on the left, nearly everyone and their mothers seem to believe corporations have been fleecing workers out of an increasing share of their earnings and keeping it for themselves. The “productivity/compensation gap,” as it has come to be called, is a key tenet of left-wing orthodoxy when it comes to explaining what happened to Americans over the past 40 years