A Looming Anniversary

 Sighhhh...

The possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine is now front page news, with little sign that Putin is going to move his massive military buildup by the border back anytime soon, even if he does not invade.  After the phone call this past week between him and Biden, supposedly lower level negotiations have started, but it is unlikely Putin is going to be given anything dramatic that he has been demanding, such as a written guarantee Ukraine will not join NATO, something that polls now say 58% of Ukrainians support in the face of the ongoing threats and invasions and annexations and other provocations that Putin keeps indulging himself in, with a loud stream of propaganda over the past year that involves simply questioning there being any legitimacy to a Ukrainian state separate from Russia at all.  What did Putin think all this noise would bring about in Ukraine? Is he actually deluded about popular opinion there?

Yes, there are almost still some areas under Ukrainian military and political control in eastern Ukraine where Russian speakers dominate and who might prefer to be under Russian control, either as part of a separatist republic like the current Russian-supported Luhansk and Donetsk republics, or as part of Russia itself as Crimea has become effectively since its annexation, although that remains unrecognized by most of the rest of the world.  Perhaps Putin will insist on invading some of those territories presumably adjacent to those currently existing republics, thus expanding the territory under his effective control before backing off.  But, perhaps he will prefer just to keep everybody on a long term state of high alert for various reasons. Presumably he is aware of which areas would be more willing to accept such control, given that clearly the vast majority of Ukraine would oppose it, which would make ruling such territory very difficult, even if he were to conquer it, which he probably could if he really pushed it, although this would surely bring a major economic cost in being shut out of the international SWIFT financial system, which would certainly make life difficult for his crony oligarch pals.

Probably the most dramatic expansion he could do and maybe even sort of get away with, although I think it would itself probably bring that expulsion from the SWIFT system, would be to conquer Kharkiv (Ukrainian name, "Kharkov" being the Russian name). This is the second largest city in Ukraine after the capital, Kyiv ("Kiev" Russian name), at about 1.5 million. This is a city with a majority Russian speakers, although I do not know current sentiment.  As it is, it nearly joined to become another separatist republic when Luhansk and Donetsk did. A "local" separatist group did briefly seize control of the city hall, what happened in Luhansk and Donetsk, but unlike in those cities, after a few days the local police, not the Ukrainian military, removed them, and that was that. It and its surrounding province and remained fully a part of Ukraine, without any of the fighting happening there since. But that would be a big prize for Putin.  As it is, the city of Donetsk, which is in the separatist territories, is officially the fifth largest city of Ukraine at about 900,000, a major center of heavy industry. 

So, why is he doing this now?  One reason, rarely mentioned in the media reports, is this looming anniversary, which I am sure is very much on his mind: Christmas Day.  It was 30 years ago on December 25, 1991, that the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin in Moscow and the Russian flag was raised. Putin has on more than one occasion declared that event to be "the worst socio-political catastrophe in world history," or words to that effect, surely a completely absurd statement. But he seems to take it seriously, and many reports do note his desire to somehow undo "the end of the Cold War," even as these reports somehow fail to note this looming 3oth anniversary of that end.

A front page story in today's Washington Post by its main Moscow correspondent, Robyn Dixon, lists six reasons why Putin is making this push.  The first is effectively this "redo the end of the Cold War" one, even as she fails to notice this looming anniversary as probably a factor in that. 

The second is the ongoing claim reinforced by Putin's long June essay on the issue that Ukraine "is not even a state," that it is or should really be at most "a protectorate" of Russia, if it even should be independent at all.  This is clearly historically absurd even if it is true that prior to the 20th century there was at most only briefly anything resembling a separate and independent Ukrainian state. Of course when one goes back far enough in time to when there was first a unified Russian-Ukrainian state, it was ruled out of Kyiv, not out of Moscow or St. Petersburg, a detail Putin and his spokespeople prefer to ignore.  But even acknowledging several centuries of Russian rule over Ukraine, even in those periods there were parts of modern Ukraine that Russia never ruled, notably the highly nationalistic western part that was ruled alternately by Poland and Austria at different times. I think even Putin is not keen on trying to rule those unruly anti-Russians there.

The third is the "security buffer" argument. Of all of the ones in this list this may have some credibility.  But Putin's own aggressive actions against Ukraine have, as already noted, turned most of Ukrainian public opinion against Russia, with a full 72% viewing Russia as a "hostile power" and pushing toward exactly those outcomes Putin does not want: Ukraine joining both the EU (62% in favor) as well as NATO (58%). He has brought about exactly what he does not want, and no amount of phony claims that the current Ukrainian government is run by a bunch of Nazis will undo that.

The fourth is essentially the fuller more explicit version of what is in the first one, the "One Russia" argument, that Ukraine really is not or should not be a separate state, and that it and Belarus should be part of Russia, or at least that Ukraine should become as subordinate to Russia as Belarus currently is. This has at times, including in Putin's June essay, involved making clearly false claims that there is not even a separate Ukrainian language or culture. However, more precisely there is the other possibly justifiable argument of admitting that there are two languages (at least) and that Russia needs to protect Russian speakers who are supposedly discriminated against and oppressed by the Ukrainian government. This was the bottom line justification for the annexation of Crimea and the support for the current separatist republics.  Again, this might be used to justify conquering some more territory in the eastern region, but that argument will not extend very far.

Then we have the "exporting chaos" argument, one that clearly has zero justification. This is based on the lie that the Ukrainian government is a total mess and not functional, when in fact it is currently democratic and fighting local corruption, if not fully successfully.  This becomes its real threat to Putin, a neighboring example of such a state, democratically run with full civil freedoms, a looming contrast to what is going on in Russia, where conditions are poor with mismanagement of the pandemic leading to a newly intensified lockdown in much of the country, and reports of Putin's poll numbers reaching new lows as he kills off or imprisons any credible rival. Of course the fake claim that the Ukrainian government is run by Nazis is part of all this, fitting in with the security buffer argument ("the Great Patriotic War!!!), although there are certainly some neo-Nazi groups operating in Ukraine who have at times had influence on governments, although not on the current one. And, of course, a Great Patriotic War abroad is always a good way to distract citizens from local problems and unhappiness, although there are some indications this may not be as popular as this stuff was in the past.  

Finally there is the claim of "Echoes of Russia's Imperial History." This may sell in Russia, but it does not do so anywhere else.  Allowing nations to claim as theirs whatever they once ruled at some time in the past when they were at their greatest power peak of expansionary rule is a recipe for total global war, given how many of such claims are totally in conflict.

I shall close by noting another unpleasant point that pretty much everybody ignores.  It is that in fact both the US and UK promised to "defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine" in the 1994 Budapest Accord, the other parties to which were Russia and Ukraine. This was the agreement that went along with Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons to Russia.  Neither the US nor UK followed up on that when Russia seized control of Crimea and then annexed it. As it is, based on that Accord, maybe NATO has no grounds for defending Ukraine against a Russian invasion, but both the US and UK are already derelict in failing to do so previously, and will be even more so if they do nothing if Russia further invades, although probably the only thing that will happen in that case will be an imposition of much more serious economic sanctions.  In any case, I hope there is no invasion, and I hope Putin can hold himself back from doing so without making too much more tension. Heck, one virtue of being an authoritarian leader is that one can change the narrative and policy at any time one wants to.  This whole aggressive move has his been his doing without any substantial provocation by outside parties.  He can just stop doing it if he chooses at any point without any threat to his rule, I think.  I hope he decides that. Although I am sure this is going to go on at least past this looming anniversary and probably into next year sometime on the best of possible outcomes.

Barkley Rosser

PS: I just noticed that spell check does not like the currently correct "Kharkiv" but seems to prefer the Russian "Kharkov."  Gag.

More Partsanization Of The Environment

 The Environmental Protection Agency was founded during the presidency of Republican Richard Nixon, if perhaps with some lack of enthusiasm. The first national cap and trade (or "tradable emissions permits") system, for SO2, was instituted during the presidency of Republican George H.W. Bush. In 2008, Republican John McCain had an alternative plan to that proposed by Democrat Barack Obama for dealing with global warming, not all that different, mostly perhaps in scale.  Likewise even in 2012, while he was less specific, Republican Mitt Romney still at least gave lip service to doing something about this matter.

While he is not outright denying that global warming is happening as the more extreme members of his party argue, incoming Republican Governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, supposedly a moderate Republican, has nevertheless announced his intention to remove Virginia from its participation in the not widely publicized Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) of which Virginia has been the southernmost participating states, the others including most of those to its northeast. This is indeed a cap and trade system for greenhouse gases. This RGGI is probably more open to criticism by those who argue that it has been too weak, too ineffective in substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the states participating in it. But at least it is pushing in the right direction and provides an institutional foundation for doing more.

So it really sticks out that incoming Governor Youngkin wants out of it. Why?  Oooh, he will save Virginia taxpayers money, actually people who pay for electricity.  The estimate he provided yesterday (as reported in today's Washington Post metro section) is about $52.44 per average customer per year in utility bills, with him complaining that the RGGI is not really doing anything.  He promises an alternative, but gives no hint of what that might be. As it is, this strictly short term possible monetary gain is likely to be offset, possibly more than fully offset, by other monetary costs that will probably increase, such as higher flood insurance for people living in the state, quite aside from the broader issue of global warming.

Anyway, this seems to be a further degradation of the Republican Party.  Here we have a supposedly moderate Republican, who clearly feels he must indulge the irresponsibility of the Trumpist/extremist wing of his party, in going against the long-running more responsible past of members of his party with respect to environmental policy.  It may be that Youngkin will not be able to do this by executive order, or may be delayed in doing so. But that he wants to and will probably try to is simply sad in my view.

Barkley Rosser

Disposable time as a common-pool resource IX -- Disposable time as a model for environmental governance

Not only could disposable time be regarded as a common-pool resource similar to other common-pool resources, but it could stand as the single most far-reaching and democratically vital model of a common-pool resource. Donald Stabile alluded to something in this vein when he noted that, "Human labor is also the primary constituent of the society whose values must be part of any criterion of social evaluation. The appropriate starting point in any policy directed at social costs is with those imposed on labor."

In "Accountants and the Price System: the Problem of Social Costs," Stabile focused on the perspective introduced by John Maurice Clark in his Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs. Clark argued that labor should be considered as an overhead cost of doing business rather than as a variable cost of the employing firm because the cost of maintaining the worker and his or her family in good stead has to be borne by someone, whether or not that worker is employed. "If all industry were integrated and owned by workers…," Clark explained, "it would be clear to worker-owners that the real cost of labor could not be materially reduced by unemployment."

Commenting on the efforts by some accountants during the 1970s to change the way social costs were accounted for on the corporate account books, Stabile concluded that those accountants had not developed useful concepts for examining social costs. To explain why they had failed, Stabile relied on the perspective on social costs set forth by Clark and by K. William Kapp in which analysis of the social costs of labor is central to a process of social evaluation. Such an outlook was missing from the works of social cost accountants, "Market values are a weak thread from which to hang a whole system of value," Stabile argued, "but accountants cling to it doggedly. Without an alteration of this basic tenet of accounting, social cost accounting cannot develop into a criterion of social value." 

Returning to Clark's example of the hypothetical state where all industry is integrated and owned by workers, there is an instance of a non-market process of social evaluation whose results can be worked out with little hesitation, unemployment would be regarded as sheer waste rather than as an unfortunate but necessary measure for accumulating surplus value. Social accounting for unemployment would come to a very different assessment of economic "efficiency" than would a narrowly financial one from capital's perspective.

Simply regarding disposable time as a common-pool resource would not automatically result in managing work as a commons. It is instead an important preliminary step that offers a rich conceptual framework for guiding the development of concrete policy proposals, research agendas, strategies and experiments. Such strategies and proposals can borrow from and combine experience in the governance of resources such as fisheries, forests and watersheds alongside lessons from trade union movements of the past and present and from feminist struggles for recognition and valuing of caregiving work.

Innovations that result from synthesizing such diverse experiences may seem disturbingly unfamiliar from the traditional perspective of viewing labour as a commodity. That is why it is important to not only foster an understanding of disposable time as a common-pool resource but in the process to not lose sight of what the traditional perspective entails and what is the relationship between the two views. In some of the most visionary lines of the Grundrisse, Marx rhapsodized about a future beyond the social contradictions of capital in which wealth is measured by the quantity of alienated labour time that capital is able to accumulate. In contrast to grim scenario, Marx briefly outlined a society in which disposable time become the measure of wealth:

For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual's entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour.

The degradation of individual to "mere worker" has its counterpart in the degradation of the earth to "mere resources," to be extracted, refined, and manufactured as quickly and extensively as possible into commodities. Conceiving of disposable time as a common-pool resource establishes a framework for understanding and resisting both forms of degradations.

Disposable time as a common-pool resource VIII -- An ecological subject

In "Foundations for Environmental Political Economy," John Dryzek explored the prospects of an environmentalist economic subject, "Homo ecologicus," as an alternative to the traditional rational actor or economic man. Dryzek criticized previous efforts at positing an ethical, environmentalist subject, saying they were flawed by wishful thinking and reductionism. The alternative Dryzek proposed instead was based on his Ostrom's case study work on managing common-pool resources. 

The alternative political economy would be one that can account for instrumental rationality – even deploy it in its proper place – but that also can point to alternatives grounded in something firmer than wishful thinking. Dryzek's alternative doesn't rely exclusively on subjectivity but also considers inter-subjectivity and communicative rationality. In Ostrom's work, what distinguished the successful case studies was communication and interaction between individuals. Participants learned to identify whom to trust, discern the effects their actions will have on others and on the shared resource, behave more "straightforwardly" toward each other and build institutional arrangements for resolving conflicts. This alternative subject, then, is habitually inclined toward social cooperation rather than atomistic individualism.

Successful institutions of the type identified by Ostrom rarely come into being through explicit contracts. More often they evolve through long periods of informal, collective learning about what works and what doesn't. Another approach to these institutions would involve more deliberate experimentation with institutional innovations. For such institutional reconstruction to take place, however, it is essential, Dryzek cautioned, that participation "move beyond the narrow community of political economists and political theorists and into society at large." Evaluating disposable time as a common pool resource could be one such deliberate experiment.

Next

RIP Sir Geoffrey C. Harcourt

 Yes, Geoff Harcourt died yesterday at age 90, not sure what of. It seems I am writing too many of these recently, but his passing deserves notice.  He is most famous for his book from 1972 Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital, which expanded on an earlier JEL paper on the topic. This has long been viewed as the clearest general discussion of that topic there is, although many people were involved in those controversies, from Piero Sraffa Joan Robinson through Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, to quite a few others, including Don Harris, father of current US VP Kamala Harris, with even me getting in on it in some later stages with a few articles. But he wrote the definitive work, which may also have been so definitive because he explained the whole thing so well.

From Adelaide, Australia originally and to which he returned for the later years of his life, he spent much of his career at Cambridge University in UK, becoming for several years the President of Jesus College there. I first met him on a visit there in 1973, just after his most famous work was published, and I found him engaging and personable, a genuinely nice guy.  And I have never heard anybody dispute that judgment.  I saw him a number of times in later years, and had not reason to change my judgment on that matter, always very friendly and outgoing.  He was one of those rare economists who had some of his  children follow him the profession. Most of us are such cranky types our children want nothing to do with it.

He wrote on many topics regarding Post Keynesian economics (or post-Keynesian economics as he preferred to spell it), while his work on the Cambridge capital theory controversies was the most famous.  However, I would like to note a special element of his career.  I am not going to dredge through the gory details, but Post Keynesian economics has been rife with splits and controversies, some of these becoming both heated and personalized, with national characters involved.  

There have been as many as six different schools of it identified, with the Modern Monetary Theory a more recent addition.  But I note three older ones that split to some degree along national lines and where the arguments became very heated.  At the most extreme opposite ends were the Americans who following Paul Davidson have emphasized the idea of uncertainty coming from Keynes.  At its opposite end are the "neo-Ricardian" Sraffians based mostly in Italy, but also with many in Britain, incuding in the past at Cambridge, notably Sraffa himself from Italy at Cambridge. They emphasized comparing long-run equlibria, with an emphasis indeed on the capital theory controversies, making it look that Harcourt would be in their camp. But he may have been more in a more strictly based camp, the neo-Kaleckians. But the later leader of the neo-Ricardians was Pierangelo Garegnani from Italy.

Anyway, during the 1980s for quite a few years there was summer camp for Post Keynesians where many of these would show up in Trieste, Italy. I never attended one of these, but I heard about them. This is where these debates became open and heated and personalized, with Davidson and Garegnani especially duking it out. I was told that it came to pass that when a prominent person from one side would give a seminar, those from the other camp would go out to hang out on the beach.  In any case, apparently there at these camps, it was Geoff Harcourt, liked and admired by everybody, who made the greatest efforts to overcome these differences and make peace, if not adjudicate intellectual rights or wrongs. For better or worse, he was unable to overcome the personalistic feuding.  But some of us know that he tried with the best intentions, and it was something so very typical of him.

Of course he had reached a substantial age, but I know that he was still putting out a few papers from time to time up until very recently.  He will be missed.

Barkley Rosser

Disposable time as a common-pool resource VII -- Common-pool property rights

Two key features of Ostrom's analysis: the distinguishing of a spectrum of separable property rights rather than monolithic "ownership" and the use of a grid that classifies goods according to how difficult it is to restrict access to them and the extent to which one person's use of a good subtracts from what is left available for others. Schlager and Ostrom identified a bundle of property rights pertaining to natural resources that they defined as follows:

1. Access: "The right to enter a defined physical property."
2. Withdrawal: "The right to obtain the "products" of a resource (e.g., catch fish, appropriate water, etc.)."
3. Management: "The right to regulate internal use patterns and transform the resource by making improvements."
4. Exclusion: "The right to determine who will have an access right, and how that right may be transferred."
5.  Alienation: "The right to sell or lease either or both of the above collective-choice (management and exclusion) rights."

The labour-as-a-commodity view actually restricts the scope of the wage earner's property right to the right to sell all the other rights (alienation!), while a common-pool resource perspective could grant access and withdrawal while retaining the three collective-choice rights.

 
Ostrom's matrix of goods is illustrated in the following diagram:

I've added "disposable time" to Ostrom's examples of common-pool resources to reflect Hodgskin's observation that skilled workers are the product of many years of unpaid care work ("under the strong influence of natural affection and parental love"). It would be extremely difficult to exclude potential beneficiaries from the resulting "good" (skilled labourer). A similar "common-pool resource" designation follows from looking at income employment as the "good" from the perspective of the worker.

Next

A Racist Screed in the New York Times

Really bad, misguided, even malicious writing serves a purpose, showing in extreme form the faults that, more subtly expressed, can pass under the radar.  That’s my reaction to this execrable column from today’s New York Times on the violation the author felt when her front lawn mini-library was perused by a white couple.

In a nutshell: Erin Aubry Kaplan lives in a historic black neighborhood, Inglewood just outside LA, and wants to sustain it against the forces of gentrification.  She also loves books.  Uniting these passions, she places a small library-on-a-post in front of her house, the sort that passers-by can scan, add titles to or take titles from as they wish.  She hopes it would provide a sense of community among her black neighbors.  But then she sees two young whites stopping to check it out.  She wrote this article to express her horror that her offering, which she placed on her own property, was being “taken” by the forces of gentrification and whiteness, threatening the future of a neighborhood she values, but also her realization that the defense of black spaces requires much more than individual action.

The first problem with the piece, probably obvious to everyone except the woman who wrote it, is that, on the basis of the information she gives, there is no reason to assume that the white couple is any wealthier than she is.  Hell, she doesn’t even know their credit rating.  If the problem with gentrification is that working class people are pushed out of their homes and communities, it’s about money, not race.  Upper-income perusers of books who happen to be black could be vectors of the process just as readily as upper-income whites.

Deeper, however, is the problem of assuming a zero-sum relationship between the well-being of different groups, racial or otherwise.  (This is something I’ve written about earlier.)  If white people have the opportunity to live in a desirable neighborhood, like the Inglewood Kaplan is striving to build, ipso facto black people have less.  Those book-sniffing whites, by their very presence, will make the area inhospitable to black homeowners or at the least deplete their social capital.

Now of course, it is entirely possible that a particular white couple with plans for redeveloping Inglewood and the resources to carry them out, could be a mortal threat.  Or that whites hostile to the customs that have evolved over generations of black settlement could, if numerous and disrespectful enough, destroy the neighborliness Kaplan values.  But neither can be inferred from the sketchy story she tells, and the underlying assumption that more opportunity for some always has to signify less for others is pernicious.

Finally, there is an unspoken assumption that neighborhood improvements like mini-libraries cumulatively add up to gentrification, replacing long-time residents with better-healed newcomers.  If that were true, then it becomes an argument for resisting any such enhancement, whether it be more attractive landscaping around someone’s house, curbside swales, local bakeries with fresh bread, mini-parks and the like.  Is that the implication?

The problem with gentrification is not that neighborhoods get too many amenities; it’s that they are amenities that cater to the rich and drive up housing values beyond the reach of those who aren’t—in an economy bifurcated between those with too much money and those with too little.  (See this earlier discussion.)  Instead of even a smidgeon of clarity about these issues, what we get instead is a screed that truly justifies the label of reverse racism, a term usually invoked by those defending the existing racial order.  This, like the antisemitism of old, is the socialism of fools.

It is also revealing that such a dreadful essay would be published by the Times, which apparently considers it within the realm of reasonable debate.  That too is a statement.

Disposable time as a common-pool resource VI -- Withholding labour

Superficially, it might seem that the individual worker can deny access to an employer offering unsuitable terms. But it is here we need to factor in that peculiarity of labour-power noted by the silk weaver, William Longson, that a day's labour not sold on the day it is offered is "lost to the labourer and to the whole community." "If his capacity for labour remains unsold," Marx agreed, "the labourer derives no benefit from it, but rather he will feel it to be a cruel nature-imposed necessity that this capacity has cost for its production a definite amount of the means of subsistence and that it will continue to do so for its reproduction."

This contingency and urgency of employment effectively undermines the worker's option of refusing work. The option of refusing work at unsuitable wages or conditions is further undermined by competition from incrementally more desperate job seekers – a population Marx famously referred to as "an industrial reserve army," a more dramatic name for the relative surplus population he analysed in the Grundrisse.

The pervasiveness of unemployment from the paid labour force collaterally stigmatizes and marginalizes unpaid work. For example, "welfare to work" schemes require single parents of young children to take low-paid work that often forces them to depend on unsuitable childcare arrangements. Such rules discount the social value of parenting work but are enforced on the grounds that public assistance recipients are employable.

There are no barriers to entry to unpaid work and relatively few credentials awarded for doing it. Thus mobility from unpaid care work to paid employment is impeded. Work done outside the paid labour force rarely counts as work experience. Instead, the time away from paid labour depreciates accumulated skills and credentials.

Next

TimeWork Web

I have added a whole bunch of stuff to the restored TimeWork Web and it looks like I am going to have to launch a sustained marketing campaign to generate traffic to it. Please excuse the self-promotion, but I think it's a pretty formidable accomplishment to sustain a research project for 26 years without any direct institutional support  (although there have been a few indirect sources of funding over the years).

The 2021 bicentennial of the publication of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties has served as the culmination of this research project. One day, perhaps, historians, Marxologist, ecological economists, degrowth advocates, shorter work time advocates, leisure scholars, and English Romantic literature scholars will come to realize why The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties really does need to be "rescued from its oblivion" once and for all.

If, as Moishe Postone wrote, Marx's analysis in the Grundisse is 'the key to interpreting his mature critique of political economy," then Marx's well-documented appreciation -- and occasional criticism -- of The Source and Remedy is the key to interpreting his analysis of the historical specificity of value in the Grundrisse.

Disposable time as a common-pool resource V -- Social costs and common-pool resources

 The basic idea behind common-pool resources also has a venerable place in the history of classical political economy and neoclassical economic thought. In the second edition of his Principles of Political Economy, Henry Sidgwick observed that "private enterprise may sometimes be socially uneconomical because the undertaker is able to appropriate not less but more than the whole net gain of his enterprise to the community." From the perspective of the profit-seeking firm, there is no difference between introducing a new, more efficient production process and simply shifting a portion of the costs or risks onto someone else, society or the environment. In fact, the opportunities for the latter may be more readily available.

One example Sidgwick used to illustrate this was "the case of certain fisheries, where it is clearly for the general interest that the fish should not be caught at certain times, or in certain places, or with certain instruments; because the increase of actual supply obtained by such captures is much overbalanced by the detriment it causes to prospective supply." Sidgwick admitted that many fishermen may voluntarily agree to limit their catch but even in this circumstance, "the larger the number that thus voluntarily abstain, the stronger inducement is offered to the remaining few to pursue their fishing in the objectionable times, places, and ways, so long as they are under no legal coercion to abstain."

Applying the same principle to the context of labour-power, "fishing in the objectionable times, places and ways" manifests itself in the standard practice of employers considering labour as a "variable cost." From the standpoint of society as a whole, unemployment is simply a way of shifting the overhead cost of labour onto society as a whole. John Maurice Clark discussed this cost-shifting aspect in the 1920s in his Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs, especially his chapter on "labor as an overhead cost."

Next

Disposable time as a common pool resource IV -- disposable time as a common pool resource

In his Grundrisse, Marx identified surplus labour time as a form of disposable time. That is to say that, under capitalism, it is labour time at the disposal of capital. "The whole development of wealth," Marx wrote, "rests on the creation of disposable time." "In production resting on capital," he continued three sentences later, "the existence of necessary labour time is conditional on the creation of superfluous labour time."

Although it strongly suggests surplus labour time -- and thus surplus value -- superfluous labour time is not identical to surplus labour time. In the Grundrisse, Marx discussed disposable time and superfluous labour time as characteristics of any human society, not exclusively historical capitalism. It is the unique characteristic of capitalism that it subordinates the performance of necessary labour to the production of surplus value. Thus, under capitalism, superfluous labour time takes on a new function, a large part of which is indeed the production of surplus value. But that is not all, as Marx explained two paragraphs later. In its drive to create as much surplus labour as possible and "to reduce necessary labour to a minimum," capital also has a tendency "to increase the labouring population, as well as constantly to posit a part of it as surplus population - population which is useless until such time as capital can utilize it." Superfluous labour time thus implies surplus population alongside surplus labour time.

Regardless of whether one works for a wage or is unemployed, the capacity to perform labour is the outcome of an intrinsically social, co-operative activity. As such, this capacity can best be understood, at least in part, as a "common-pool resource" in that it may most effectively be engaged, valued, enjoyed and protected as a collectively-shared asset rather than as a fragmented assortment of individualized units, which is the current model of labour-as-a-commodity. Relating the concept of a common-pool good to labour is especially apt in that it illuminates, as Burkett points out, "the parallel between capital's extension of work time beyond the limits of human recuperative abilities [including social vitality], and capital's overstretching of the regenerative powers of the land." However, there is also an important distinction between wealth, which can be accumulated and preserved, and those subsistence goods that must be consumed directly to sustain life and enable work to continue. Social production would cease if the producers themselves were denied the goods necessary to their sustenance. Therefore it would be logical to regard only the produce of disposable time, that is superfluous labour time, as goods held in common.

Next

Disposable time as a common-pool resource III -- Labour power as a common pool resource

 Human mental and physical capacities to work have elastic but definite natural limits. Those capacities must be continuously restored and enhanced through nourishment, rest and social interaction. Over the longer term that capacity for labour also has to be replenished by a new generation of youth, reared by the previous generation.

It is this combination of definite limits and of the need for continuous recuperation and replacement that, according to Paul Burkett, gives labour-power the characteristics of a common-pool resource. As Burkett explained, Karl Marx also regarded labour power not merely as a marketable asset of private individuals but as a "reserve fund for the regeneration of the vital force of nations." "From the standpoint of the reproduction and development of society," Burkett elaborated, "labor power is a common-pool resource – one with definite (albeit elastic) natural limits."

Here is where I would amend Burkett's definition to designate disposable time -- rather than labour power -- as the common-pool resource. The rationale for doing so is that the working day consists of two distinct parts, one of which is the labour time necessary to provide for the subsistence of the worker and the worker's family and represented by the wage. The second part of the working day is labour performed to create value that is taken by capital and is referred to as surplus labour time or surplus value. The proportion of surplus labour time to necessary labour time, however, is not a constant and changes with changes in the length of the working day and the productivity of labour.

Next

Disposable time as a common-pool resource II -- Labour is not a commodity

 Labour was conventionally regarded as a private good by both classical political economists and conservative thinkers such as Edmund Burke, who argued, "labour is a commodity like every other, and rises and falls according to the demand." The counterpoint to that view, since the early 19th century is that labour (power) is not a commodity because it has characteristics that no other commodity has. Labour Economist Robert Prasch summarized these characteristics as: "(1) Labor cannot be separated from its providers. (2) Labor cannot be stored. (3) Labor embodies the quality of self-consciousness. (4) Labor is the one "factor of production" that most of us wish, in the end, to see well compensated."

The negative claim was officially endorsed in Section 6 of the U.S. Clayton Antitrust Act, passed by Congress in 1915. Hailed by American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers as a "Charter of Industrial Freedom," Section 6 proclaimed that "the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce." Nearly identical wording was incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as a guiding principle for the establishment of the International Labour Organization and reaffirmed as a first principle of the I.L.O. in 1944.

The everyday experience of working people, economic policies of governments, bargaining priorities of trade unions and theoretical models of economists would seem to conform more to the commodity model than the idealistic but nebulous proclamations of the Clayton Act and the Treaty of Versailles. But an early rationale for the rebuttal was outlined in 1834 by silk weaver William Longson in his evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Hand-Loom Weavers:

…every other commodity when brought to market, if you cannot get the price intended, it may be taken out of the market, and taken home, and brought and sold another day; but if a day's labour is offered on any day, and is not sold on that day, that day's labour is lost to the labourer and to the whole community…

Longson concluded from these observations of labour's peculiarities that, "I can only say I should be as ready to call a verb a substantive as any longer to call labour a commodity." 

Another formidable challenge to the notion of labour as a commodity had been articulated nine years earlier by Thomas Hodgskin in his Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital. Hodgskin pointed out that the most important operation for the production of wealth, "the rearing of youth and teaching them skilled labour, or some wealth-creating art." As Hodgskin continued, "this most important operation is performed… without any circulating capital whatever," that is to say, without compensation in either money or goods. Instead, child rearing is performed, "under the strong influence of natural affection and parental love… through all the long period of the infancy and childhood of their offspring."

In both Longson's and Hodgskin's arguments, the unstated distinction between labour and labour power was crucial. No actual labour was performed in Longson's example. What the labourer offered on the market but was unable to sell was his or her capacity to work on that particular day. Similarly, what parents give to their children by bringing them up and teaching them skills is a capacity to labour, provided the opportunity arises to exercise that capacity. Wage labour per se only comes into existence after the capacity to labour has been purchased and combined by the employer with facilities, equipment, raw materials and direction.

Next

RIP David M. Grether

 I have only just now learned that Dave Grether died on Sept. 12 of causes unreported at age 82. He was an emeritus prof of econ at Cal Tech.  He received his PhD in 1969 from Stanford in econometrics. He soon was at Cal Tech where he spent the rest of his career, soon becoming an early figure in experimental economics, coauthoring papers with colleague, Charles Plott, whom many think should have shared the Nobel Prize with Vernon Smith for founding experimental economics. Dave's most famous paper was with Plott in 1979 in the AER on preference reversals, an anomaly in which people are seen to violate a standard axiom of rational preferences in economic theory, although they found that if people redo the experiment numerous times they tend to start behaving more like economic theory predicts. Cal Tech has since then been a leading location for experimental economics and still is.

Dave is perhaps less well known than some others partly because he moved heavily into administration. Cal Tech does not have a separate econ department, with it in a Social Sciences School. He served as its Director for a substantial period, and then would become Chair of the Humanities and Social Sciences Division, with him being widely praised in both of those positions. This latter position reflected that he had a very broad knowledge and view of things, apparently having a fully scholarly knowledge of history. Part of why Cal Tech became and remains a top location for experimental economics reflects his efforts in those positions.

I came to know him because another thing he did was to become a coeditor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO), the coeditor largely in charge of handling papers on experimental economics, with JEBO a leading outlet for such papers.  He was appointed to that position by the journal's founder, the late Dick Day, who just died a few months ago also. I edited the journal from 2001-2010, with Dave staying on as that coeditor until about two years before I stepped aside. I came to both respect him and also like him a lot, a very open-minded and wise person.

One thing he played a major role in was playing the key role in getting the first paper on field experiments by John List and Jason Shogren, a professor of his at U. of Wyoming where he got his PhD. At the time John was basically an unknown, although now he is at the U. of Chicago and widely viewed as near certain to get his own Nobel basically for publishing that paper. At a conference honoring Dave Grether, an organizer managed to inveigle a leading advocate of lab experiments to engsge in unpleasant criticism of John, that being at a time when the field experimentalists were challenging the lab folks for getting funding support from NSF for their experiments. John was put on a hot seat, from where he handled himself well.  But Dave was upset about this and went behind the scenes to make peace between the parties. He was that kind of guy.

Anyway, I am sorry to learn that he has passed, someone who played a more important role behind a lot of scenes than many realized. I shall miss him.

Barkley Rosser 

Disposable time as a common-pool resource I -- Introduction

About a decade ago, I wrote a short piece about "labour power as a common-pool resource" that got picked up by Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation and led to me being invited to a conference on the commons in Berlin put on by the Heinrich Böll Foundation. I would now like to amend that to regard disposable time as the common-pool resource in question. Much of my original rationale applies as well or better to the new formulation. I am assuming that all of this will be new to most readers.

Common-pool resource is a category of goods introduced by Elinor Ostrom in work for which she was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009. For Ostrom, common-pool resources are goods that don't fit tidily into the categories of either private or public goods. They are like private goods in that their use by one consumer subtracts from how much is available for others. But they are like public goods in that it is difficult to exclude people from access to them. Some obvious examples are forests, fisheries, aquifers and the atmosphere. Ostrom distinguished between common-pool resources that are unregulated and "the commons," which is collectively self-managed. From this distinction came her criticism of Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons," which assumed an unmanaged common-pool resource rather than a collectively self-managed commons.

Disposable time is a much older and more ambivalent concept. Usually people assume it refers to leisure, which they conceive of as recreation or idleness. Traditionally, though, leisure was associated with education, culture and self-improvement and was mostly an exclusive privilege of the upper classes. In part, disposable time embraces that older conception of leisure but universalizes it. But in his Grundrisse, Karl Marx added another dimension to disposable time by also associating it with labour time that was in excess of what was necessary for subsistence. Thus, labour time that is superfluous to what is necessary for the workers' subsistence could be at the disposal of capital for the production of surplus value.

Next