Steady-state equilibrium

A property of the Solow-Swan growth model which is a bit disturbing is the fact that, at steady-state, all ratios -- the capital-labor ratio, output per person and consumption per person -- remain constant.

This is a bit of a disappointment for it implies that standards of living do not improve in steady-state growth. This is not only despiriting, it is also empirically dubious: it contradicts at least two of the "stylized facts" of industrialized economies laid out in Kaldor (1961) -- namely, that the capital-labor and output-labor ratios have been rising over time and that the real wage has been rising. Of course, just because industrialized countries, and others besides, have experienced ever-increasing per capita consumption and output over the past three centuries does not, by itself, "contradict" the Solow-Swan model.

After all, out of steady-state, we can easily have changing ratios. So, one possible explanation for the "stylized facts" that is consistent with the Solow-Swan model is simply that industrialized nations are still in the process of adjusting and just have not reached their steady-state equilibrium yet. And why not? It is not unreasonable to assume that adjustment to steady state might take a very long time (cf. Sato, 1963; Atkinson, 1969).But economists are a rather impatient sort. They like to believe that economies tend to be at or around their steady-states most of the time (a noble exception is Meade (1961)).

As a consequence, in order to reconcile the Solow-Swan model with the stylized facts, it is tempting to argue that there has been some sort of "technical progress" in the matter.

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Labour time

Marx demonstrates that time is manifested in the material world through a process that expresses transhistorical features in the emanation of time through human creative activity, and historically specific elements in the socially constructed forms of time that reflect the material conditions of the particular society in which they appear.

It suggests, moreover, that he shows how time is shaped by both human agency, in the form of class struggle over the appropriation and control of time, as well by deterministic forces as seen in the role of institutional structures and the movement and reproduction of capital. Again, it endeavours to show that Marx develops the notion that absolute time, which is an historically specific concept, plays a crucial role in capitalist society as a measure of exchange-value and labour time, and that it co-exists with relative time, which emanates through different production processes as multiple and discontinuous temporalities.


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Standart of living

A property of the Solow-Swan growth model which is a bit disturbing is the fact that, at steady-state, all ratios -- the capital-labor ratio, output per person and consumption per person -- remain constant.

This is a bit of a disappointment for it implies that standards of living do not improve in steady-state growth. This is not only despiriting, it is also empirically dubious: it contradicts at least two of the "stylized facts" of industrialized economies laid out in Kaldor (1961) -- namely, that the capital-labor and output-labor ratios have been rising over time and that the real wage has been rising.

Of course, just because industrialized countries, and others besides, have experienced ever-increasing per capita consumption and output over the past three centuries does not, by itself, "contradict" the Solow-Swan model. After all, out of steady-state, we can easily have changing ratios. So, one possible explanation for the "stylized facts" that is consistent with the Solow-Swan model is simply that industrialized nations are still in the process of adjusting and just have not reached their steady-state equilibrium yet. And why not? It is not unreasonable to assume that adjustment to steady state might take a very long time (cf. Sato, 1963; Atkinson, 1969).

But economists are a rather impatient sort. They like to believe that economies tend to be at or around their steady-states most of the time (a noble exception is Meade (1961)).

As a consequence, in order to reconcile the Solow-Swan model with the stylized facts, it is tempting to argue that there has been some sort of "technical progress" in the matter.


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Capitalism ready to move on e-books ?

If there is a profit to be made from literary texts, then this is what we will see (at a price).

What seems less likely to occur is the digitisation of the mass of printed texts currently stored in libraries. Considering only the literary field, we now have available a number of the canonical literary texts (especially in French and English) in electronic form, but these are for the most part not annotated as they are in scholarly printed editions, which makes them less immediately useful for readers. More important, there is a vast amount of other literature and a body of critical material which remains in print form. Little of this will be digitised for the simple reason that there is little profit to be made from the scholarly environments in which it is read.

Digitisation is not cheap. During a project David S. Miall managed several years ago to digitise a number of texts (from the Romantic period), the average cost of producing a reliable, proof-read electronic edition of a novel was about $4000. Consider the book and journal collections in all the other disciplines that a library holds: only a minute fraction of this material will ever be digitised.

(from D.S.Miall)

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Irrelevant practice of writing

Jameson relates the bourgeois attitude toward art as separate from social reality directly to the ideology of bourgeois individualism.

This ideology leads to the perception that private life is sharply distinguished from the public world of politics in a way that parallels the bourgeois tendency to treat art as a self-enclosed realm separate from the social and political world. But this perception of art does not elevate it as somehow superior to everyday reality; instead it merely renders art irrelevant, diminishing its function in life. Similarly Jameson insists that the ostensible privileging of the private over the public that is central to bourgeois individualism actually impoverishes private life by obscuring the domination of the individual by capitalism and creating a false illusion of individual autonomy.

Far from creating the strong, independent individuals mythologized by bourgeois ideology, capitalism "maims our existence as individual subjects and paralyzes our thinking".

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Only True Event

In a recent essay, Jameson declares that history in the modern sense is an invention of the European bourgeoisie designed to tell the story of the cultural revolution through which it rose to hegemony in Europe.

The story of "the transition from feudalism to capitalism," suggests Jameson, "is what is secretly (or more deeply) being told in most contemporary historiography, whatever its ostensible content." Further more, Jameson argues, this view of history makes the bourgeois cultural revolution "the only true Event of history".

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Technique as an end in itself

Lukacs argues that modernist writers such as James Joyce and Franz Kafka make technique an end in itself, without regard for the human realities that this technique is supposed to convey.

This "negation of outward reality" is a central project of modernist writing, which represents a turning away from the world and a retreat into an aesthetic realm divorced from social reality. And this disengagement is in direct complicity with the main cultural thrust of bourgeois society, which seeks to isolate art in a separate realm and thus deprive it of any potentially subversive political force. Modernist texts are thus for Lukacs not progressive documents interacting with history in a positive and productive way.

Instead they are sterile artifacts divorced from history and totally caught up in the inexorable drive of capitalist society to convert all it touches into mere commodities.

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Growing fragmentation in literature

The philosopher Lukacs sees nineteenth-century capitalism resulting in a growing fragmentation in life.

He believes that literature and culture undergo a corresponding tendency toward fragmentation and loss of totality. As the nineteenth century proceeds, the bourgeoisie, now firmly in power, becomes a reactionary, rather than a revolutionary, class, and its literature consequently begins to decline in quality. For example, Lukacs characterizes the transition from realism to naturalism in European literature (epitomized by the movement from Honore de Balzac to Emile Zola in France) as a process of decay, naturalism being a distortion and deterioration of realism into abstraction.

But Lukacs's harshest criticism is reserved for modernist literature.

In essence, he believes that the formal fragmentation of modernist texts participates in the process of reification that is itself central to the fragmentation of social life under capitalism. Lukacs sees in the dazzling verbal constructions of modernist writers a reflection of this process.

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Textual fragmentation and capitalism

Fredric Jameson has argued for the necessary relation between expressions of psychic and textual fragmentation and a concomitant socio-economic fracturing characteristic of late capitalism."

[I]t is not the unity of the world that demands to be posited on the basis of the unity of the transcendental subject; rather, the unity or incoherence and fragmentation of the subject that is, the inaccessability of a workable subject position or the absence of one ‹ is itself a correlative of the unity or lack of unity of the outside world". (FJ)On a related note, some feminist anthropologists have found it more than a bit strange that postmodern theorists began to question the basis of certain truths at precisely the moment when they lost the absolute privilege to define them. [Hartsock, Marcia-Lees, Nicholson] Thus the postmodern turn may be an expression not of some absolutely true state of things, but of the decentering and fragmentation currently experienced by dominant groups and classes, experiences that are at least partly the result of women's struggle for equality in the home and the workplace in the latter half of the twentieth century.

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Politically unactive

The decadence of capitalism is not the eternal repetition of its contradictions on a growing scale, but poses the question of its survival as a mode of production today.

Are we really able to continue like this? See what happens all around the world... But what can people say and what can they do in a capitalist country where the regime has achieved stability and does not encounter any difficulties in the short term, where the population is not politically active, where (as is the case in the United States in particular) even industrial actions occur very rarely and remain very limited in scope?

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Fragment and socio-economic fracturing

Fredric Jameson has argued for the necessary relation between expressions of psychic and textual fragmentation and a concomitant socio-economic fracturing characteristic of late capitalism.

"[I]t is not the unity of the world that demands to be posited on the basis of the unity of the transcendental subject; rather, the unity or incoherence and fragmentation of the subject that is, the inaccessability of a workable subject position or the absence of one ‹ is itself a correlative of the unity or lack of unity of the outside world". (FJ)

On a related note, some feminist anthropologists have found it more than a bit strange that postmodern theorists began to question the basis of certain truths at precisely the moment when they lost the absolute privilege to define them. [Hartsock, Marcia-Lees, Nicholson] Thus the postmodern turn may be an expression not of some absolutely true state of things, but of the decentering and fragmentation currently experienced by dominant groups and classes, experiences that are at least partly the result of women's struggle for equality in the home and the workplace in the latter half of the twentieth century.

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Parodying

Circulation dynamic of texts published on the Internet resembles the medieval and Renaissance practice of glossing, parodying, or otherwise altering a manuscript before passing it along.

Slowly, though, the fixity and ubiquity of print have unfortunately eradicated such practices, all but banishing the notion of a collaborative, textually permeable work. Now, the cult of the author and the printing press are still inextricably linked; you can't have one without the other. By chance, digital text, however, requires neither.

As a consequence, and much to the chagrin of political critics, no economic model has yet been devised to explain its production and propagation in a capitalist society.

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