Re: standard of living?

----- Original Message -----
From: Pat Gunning <jgunning@squ.edu.om>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: Thursday, May 20, 1999 6:04 AM
Subject: Re: standard of living?



I haven't checked my e-mail for some time, so I apologize for entering this
discussion in the middle.  Nonetheless, I intervene  precisely becuase these
observations strike me as inaccurate and downright wrong.

> "Jeffrey L. Beatty" wrote:
>
> > Actually, it's a "zero-sum game" primarily in the minds of people in the
world-system tradition. The >claim of Andre Gunder Frank and others that
development and underdevelopment are two sides of the >same coin and that,
in effect, what one country gains another loses depends upon the assumption
that >the total size of the economic "pie" cannot increase, i.e., that
worldwide aggregate growth is impossible.

This is downright absurd, I don't think that AGF or IW or anybody else who
is even vaguely familar with W-S would maintain that the "economic pie" can
not increase.  One merely has to look at history.  In fact, this has never
been an issue.  The issue is that the pie is ALWAYS divided unequally in
such a matter that certain regions of the world economy accumulate surplus
wealth, if you will, wealth over and above that which is created in the
region, by transferring it from other regions.  Historically,  the
mechanisms and means of transfer have varied and ranged from colonialism,
through the slave trade and unequal exchange to massive loans made by core
banks to the "Third World", but the end result is that a susbtantial part of
the wealth that accumulates at one pole or region of the world economy,
i.e., the core, is derived from other regions of the world economy.  At the
same time, transfer of wealth out of the periphery has historically stunted
and perverted ("underdeveloped")the periphery (as opposed to an image of the
periphery or "less developed countries" as "undeveloped.)



>This argument, in turn, depends upon the assumption that the productivity
of a finite set of factors of >production cannot be increased by
technological change. Is anyone willing to argue that technological >change
increasing productivity never occurs? If so, is there any economic theory
that can explain why or >in what sense it never occurs?>

This merely illusrtates that you can't see the forest for the trees.  Again,
no one in their right mind would argue that produvtivity is fixed.  This is
not the issue.  For W-S as for Marx, the issue is not that there is any
fixed limit or cap on the ability of humanity to generate wealth but rather
how this welath is divided.  AS the bourgoise exploits the proletariat, the
core (in W-S lingo) exploits the periphery.  BTW, I think this point was
made by Bukharin in the first or second deacde of the 20th c.


>
> To add to Jeffrey's points, the validity of the "pie" argument also
> depends on the assumption that we know what the finite set of factors of
> production are, how they can be used to produce goods, an how to cause
> them to be used to produce goods. In a market economy, such knowledge is
> produced and possessed by almost uncountable minds of human specialists.
> It does not exist and cannot exist in the mind of any single person or
> central planning committee.

Huh?  I don't understand what is meant by the validity of the pie argument -
does that mean the belief that the pie CAN  be expanded or the belief that
it CAN NOT be expanded.  Moreover, I don't see how this and what follows
(which I have deleted) relates to the point above.


Carl Dassbach