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	<title>World Socialist Party (US) &#187; Economics</title>
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	<copyright>Copyright &#xA9; World Socialist Party (US) 2010 </copyright>
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		<title>World Socialist Party (US)</title>
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	<itunes:author>World Socialist Party (US)</itunes:author>
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		<title>US Wages Down</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/03/2492/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/03/2492/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 07 Mar 2012 06:42:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Suzy</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2492</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Young workers see pay shrink in United States. The Economic Policy Institute think tank found that the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage for male college graduates aged 23 to 29 dropped 11% over the past decade to $21.68 in 2011. For female college graduates of the same age, the average wage is down 7.6% to $18.80. For the entire working population, average hourly wages have risen modestly over the past 10 years. But that is partly because many of the lowest-paid workers have lost their jobs and are no longer included in the average.&#8221;People who normally make below-average wages are not working,&#8221; said Bart Hobijn, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. &#8221;That raises the average wage.&#8221; For men with only high school degrees, aged 19 to 25, the average wage is down 10% from a decade ago to $11.68. For women in the same category, the average has declined 9.2% to $9.92 Downward pressure on wages is likely to persist as long as unemployment remains high. In recessions, employers rarely cut wages for their long-standing workers, though they often impose wage freezes or grant below inflation-rate ones. No related posts.


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Pigs, fat cats or scapegoats?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/03/pigs-fat-cats-or-scapegoats/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/03/pigs-fat-cats-or-scapegoats/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 03 Mar 2012 04:24:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Theory]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2480</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Bankers are unpopular. Not the ordinary bank teller or the back-up IT staff, but the directors and top managers who award themselves huge salaries and big bonuses. They are so unpopular, in fact, that the chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, Stephen Hester, has been forced to give up a bonus of nearly £1m while his predecessor, Sir Fred Goodwin, has been stripped of his knighthood. The banks defend themselves by arguing that they bring &#8220;wealth&#8221; into Britain, and pay a considerable amount of tax on it. Some even describe themselves as &#8220;wealth creators&#8221;. This is absurd. What banks do is compete for a share of the pool of wealth already created by the productive sections of the world’s working class, wealth which is extracted from them as surplus value. They can be more or less successful in doing this. Banks situated in Britain can channel some of the world&#8217;s surplus value this way which might otherwise have gone elsewhere, but this is capturing surplus value rather than creating wealth. In this way, banks do bring profits to Britain and the taxes they pay on it help finance the capitalist state. It&#8217;s an argument that carries some weight with [...]


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		<item>
		<title>On the Crisis: Paul Mattick</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/02/on-the-crisis-paul-mattick/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/02/on-the-crisis-paul-mattick/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 24 Feb 2012 03:04:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crisis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Theory]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2391</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["This is not to say that Marx's ideas can't be measured against experience. His predictions need to be compared with the history of capitalism over the last 200 years. From this perspective, Marx's ideas come off very well, as the main tendencies he predicted for capitalism – towards the supplanting of human labour by machinery, the concentration and centralisation of capital, the spread of wage labour, the tendency towards widescale unemployment, and above all the recurrence of periods of depression – have been realised. In fact, I would say that Marx's theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall over the long term is the only convincing account of the business cycle that there is."


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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Crisis: the stories so far</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/06/crisis-the-stories-so-far/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/06/crisis-the-stories-so-far/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 04 Jun 2011 05:14:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Books]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Crisis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2283</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Business As Usual: The Economic Crisis And The Failure Of Capitalism by Paul Mattick. Reacktion Books: 2011. Just yesterday, we were all supposed to believe that the globalisation of capitalism and free markets was the route to freedom, peace and prosperity for all. Then, with barely an explanation, and somewhat out of the blue, the story changed. Now we are to believe that, due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, prosperity will have to give way to austerity. The good times are over. It is characteristic of crises that the stories we are expected to believe suddenly change. But how can we understand the change? And might there not be better stories than the rather grim and gloomy one we’ve been ordered to swallow? Paul Mattick Jnr’s short book is just such an alternative. For him the crisis signals the complete bankruptcy and destruction of mainstream economics. Why crisis is impossible Why did the crisis appear as a bolt out of the blue? Why was it not expected or anticipated by any economist or mainstream commentator? In short, because there is no place in the standard economic story for crisis, any more than there’s a place for wizards and interstellar travel [...]


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		<item>
		<title>Was the crisis just a mistake?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/03/was-the-crisis-just-a-mistake/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/03/was-the-crisis-just-a-mistake/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 13 Mar 2011 08:04:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2167</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission set up by the US government reported at the end of January. They concluded that the crisis of 2007 and 2008 was the result of “human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire”, but “of human mistakes, misjudgments, and misdeeds” and so avoidable. Obviously, the crisis was the outcome, even if unintended, of decisions by humans to behave in particular ways, but that’s not at issue. We need to know why the economic decision-makers involved took the decisions they did. What was the context of their decisions? What were the constraints acting on them? The driving force of capitalism is the pursuit of profits by competing enterprises. As the Commission put it, “in our economy, we expect businesses and individuals to pursue profits…” If there is a chance to make a profit from some activity then the businesses in that field will go for it. If the profits are high enough then other businesses will enter the field to share in the bonanza. This is what happened in the US. From 1997 until 2006 there was a boom in house building and buying. Big profits were to be made from [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Who Pays the Price of the Recession?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/01/who-pays-the-price-of-the-recession/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/01/who-pays-the-price-of-the-recession/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Jan 2011 06:26:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SPGB</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2034</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Households face the most dramatic squeeze in living standards since the 1920s, Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England warned. Families will see their disposable income eaten up as they “pay the inevitable price” for the financial crisis. With wages failing to keep pace with rising inflation, workers’ take- home pay will end the year worth the same as in 2005 — the most prolonged fall in living standards for more than 80 years. Households face the most dramatic squeeze in living standards since the 1920s, Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England warned. Families will see their disposable income eaten up as they “pay the inevitable price” for the financial crisis. With wages failing to keep pace with rising inflation, workers’ take- home pay will end the year worth the same as in 2005 — the most prolonged fall in living standards for more than 80 years.“In 2011, real wages are likely to be no higher than they were in 2005,” he said. “One has to go back to the 1920s to find a time when real wages fell over a period of six years&#8230;The squeeze on living standards is the inevitable price to pay [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>World poverty: cause and effects</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/11/world-poverty-cause-and-effects-2/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/11/world-poverty-cause-and-effects-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:15:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Suzy</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1909</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How should poverty be measured if at all? Part of the measure of statistics is that, however well-meant the goal, there are bound to be flaws and weaknesses. Any individual&#8217;s subjective assessment of their own poverty will likely be quite different from that of an objective report. Over the years different studies have listed different requirements to be included into what constitutes poverty, but how many of these have consulted with the subjects of the report as to their own assessment of their situation? If poverty is to be eliminated, how it is manifested in different parts of the world, how it impacts differently on people of different regions and particularly its causes need to be thoroughly understood. “Our aim should be to set the poverty line at a level where people can actually have a standard of living which we would consider morally acceptable,” says David Woodward in a July/August New Internationalist article. The article, based on a report which he co-authored with Saamah Abdallah, explains the pitfalls and openings for misinterpretation of such economic-based poverty lines as the well known dollar-a-day as used in measuring the Millennium Development Goals. At least, he says, the dollar-a-day approach put poverty [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>China’s working class drives capitalist development</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/09/china%e2%80%99s-working-class-drives-capitalist-development/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/09/china%e2%80%99s-working-class-drives-capitalist-development/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Sep 2010 01:26:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Suzy</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1779</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The heroic and inspiring struggles of China’s working class will only lay the ground for new and improved exploitation methods – unless, that is, the struggle turns political – and socialist. “I do the same thing every day,” said one employee at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where more than ten workers have committed suicide. “I have no future.” Many, perhaps most, workers will know exactly how he feels. But to the bourgeois mind, it’s all an impenetrable puzzle. There was something criminally stupid and sickeningly idiotic about the reaction to the suicides of Terry Gou, the billionaire founder and chairman of the company, which makes electronic parts for the likes of Apple and Dell. According to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek (7 June), Gou said that he had no idea why the suicides were happening. “From a logical, scientific standpoint, I don’t have a grasp on that,” said Gou. “No matter how you force me, I don’t know.” Another worker interviewed at the factory might have given the hapless Gou a few clues: conversation and human interaction on the production line is forbidden, bathroom breaks are kept to ten minutes every two hours, and workers are yelled at [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Communist Camp</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/08/communist-camp/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/08/communist-camp/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Aug 2010 21:23:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Suzy</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1631</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What happens when you swap your wage-slavery for a rucksack? You get communism. That, at least, was the argument of Aditya Chakrabortty in a column for the Guardian (13 July), drawing on the arguments of the late Marxist philosopher GA Cohen. Camping and caravan trips last year were up 27 percent on the previous year and sales of tents and other equipment continue to climb, as workers cut back on holiday spending due to the recession, according to a report in the same newspaper. But camping, says Chakrabortty, is not just a bit of fun (or a horrific trial comparable to fleeing a war zone with your belongings strapped to your back, depending on taste): it’s also a “socio-political experiment” demonstrating the feasibility of communism. How so? Well, on a camping trip, “adult hierarchy is flattened, utensils and resources are pooled. Tasks are performed as a unit: you may lay on the food, but your friend is a better cook, and her boyfriend will clean the dishes. There is no question of people being paid differently for different tasks. Nor [can you claim a] ‘banjo bonus’ for providing a highly-valued service enjoyed by less-talented souls.” And the objections to this [...]


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		<item>
		<title>Life is sweet for the rich</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2010/07/life-is-sweet-for-the-rich/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2010/07/life-is-sweet-for-the-rich/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:38:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Suzy</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Work]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=1609</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[From MarketWatch.com Tiffany &#38; Co says sales at its flagship New York store jumped 26% in the first quarter. International luxury goods giant Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy whose brands range from Fendi to Givenchy to Moet &#38; Chandon Champagne, plus, of course, Vuitton bags says U.S. sales boomed 20% in the first quarter, including a remarkable 58% boost for sales of jewelry and expensive watches like Tag Heuer. the Swiss watch federation says exports of luxury watches (those $2,000 &#8220;timepieces&#8221;) to the U.S. rose 12% in May and are now ahead 9% for the year. Super-luxury goods purveyor Richemont which owns such brands as Cartier, Dunhill, and Van Cleef &#38; Arpels says U.S. sales are up. The Sunseeker Club in New York, America&#8217;s biggest dealership in the multi-million dollar British luxury power boats say business is strong again. Those who have the money to spend, they say, are spending it. The truth is, this is a great time in which to be rich. According to consultants Cap Gemini, the wealthy saw their net worth bounce back sharply last year. And while those with $1 million or more did pretty well, the real story was the boom among the ultra rich: [...]


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