Back in the 1930s there was a Polish Marxist economist, Michel Kalecki, who argued that recessions were functional for the ruling class and for capitalism because they created excess supply of labor, forced workers to work harder to keep their jobs, and so produced a rise in the rate of relative surplus-value.
For thirty years, ever since I got into this business, I have been mocking Michel Kalecki. I have been pointing out that recessions see a much sharper fall in profits than in wages. I have been saying that the pace of work slows in recessions–that employers are more concerned with keeping valuable employees in their value chains than using a temporary high level of unemployment to squeeze greater work effort out of their workers.
I don’t think that I can mock Michel Kalecki any more, ever again.
via ZOMFG WTF!!!!! 9.5% THIRD QUARTER PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH NUMBER!!!! – J. Bradford DeLong’s Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles.
I’m posting this to highlight what I believe anybody who is serious about living fact based lives should be doing. Confronting evidence that goes against what we believe in. We cannot just shrug these things, or deny stuff (of course we can but that puts us in the class of people we call stupid or happy ).