Really?

This is interesting news don\’t you think?

The bull runs of the 1980s and 1990s, and the first half of this decade, with their epoch-making transfer of wealth to the richest 1% of the population, have distracted attention from the actual long-term weakening of advanced capitalist economies. Economic performance in the US, western Europe and Japan has, by virtually every standard indicator – output, investment, employment and wages – deteriorated, decade by decade, business cycle by business cycle, since the early 70s.

1) There\’s been no transfer of wealth. There\’s been a differential allocation of the new wealth created, yes, but not an actual transfer.

2) Err, output, investment and wages are all lower than they were in the early 1970s? It is to laugh.

The years since the current cycle began in early 2001 have been the worst of all – in the US, growth of GDP and jobs has been the slowest since the end of the 1940s, and real hourly wages for about 80% of the workforce have languished at about their 1979 level.

I would love to see where that wages number comes from, really, I would. I have a sneaking suspicion that he\’s looking at "real hourly wages of all employees". Which, given that there\’s been a huge structural change in the workfoce since thn, with part-timers and women flooding into it, is really not a very enlightening number.

The rest of it reads rather like the coming of the Marxist Gotterdamerung. Falling profitability…corporations oppressing the workers….wouldn\’t be surprised to see the reserve army of the unemployed turn up along with the progessive immiseration of the working classes.

Sigh, I thought we\’d rather given up on that failed analysis?