(This is going to be a little fragmented because of some recent family challenges, which only make one think about how much a material history enforces its own kinds of legacies. I fully expect the market for lawfare will gain more activity soon. In the time I have left, I have several research threads I’d like to pursue)
The following vids tie my current interests together because conflicts over Land, Labor, & Capital are conjoined by rent: most of us associate it with temporary ownership or housing but it usually is a considerable part of one’s budget. For example, on Sep 30, 2021The national median rent rose to $1,302 in September, up 15% from a year ago, according to a report from Apartment List, a rental listing site.
Rent is a concept that suggests that we need to reexamine it at the detail of Marx on ground rent aiding us in the study of the class struggle. Japanese scholars are leading the way, along with Chinese ones on virtual capital, as well as contemporary Germans on the information economy.
Those who have followed my prior ramblings will sense that I want to extend the ecosocialist model into a larger model of virtual capital. This follows on the thoughts about fictitious capital that manifest themselves as financialization and materialize in the political economy of rents writ large developed from classical ground rent and commodity economics. The future of my research will be to outline the geospatial information problems of such (virtual) capital in a variety of contexts, from the freeport to the allocation of telecom electromagnetic spectrum, each with implications for financialization.
The micro-examples can be researched in the differential rents ranging from redlining to ecotourism. Similarly the commodification of audiences has spatial rent implications in the formation of cultural districts or recreational land use. Similarly, the formation of cultural spectacle is tied to the commodity form of global peace. And lastly the urgency of climate crisis requires even closer attention to the critique of neolliberal solutions ranging from carbon markets to carbon capture and their contrast with renewable energy technology policy.
Too much historicizing, too little time remaining. As with most of my stuff I want the reader to imagine that the pattern of items below has a pattern, however circuitous. Future items in ACM and ACC will point toward these issues.
The capitalist system (commodity-knowledge, value added by brand, financialization). Although seemingly unrelated, these phenomena can be theoretically connected with the aid of Marx’s theory of rent, as it appears in Section VI of Book III of Capital, and in Theories of Surplus Value.
‘Market power’ may have delivered rents to some very large companies in the US, but Marx’s law of profitability still holds as the best explanation of the accumulation process. Rents to the few are a deduction from the profits of the many. Monopolies redistribute profit to themselves in the form of ‘rent’ but do not create profit. Profits are not the result of the degree of monopoly or rent seeking, as neo-classical and Keynesian/Kalecki theories argue, but the result of the exploitation of labour. Moreover, rents are no more than 20% of value-added in any major economy; financial profits are even smaller a proportion. Moreover, the rise of renterism in the recent period is really a counteracting factor to the decline in the profitability of productive capital.
braveneweurope.com/…
[...]
Few socialist parties or theorists have dealt with the rise of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector that now accounts for most increase in wealth. Instead of evolving into socialism, Western capitalism is being overcome by predatory finance and rent extraction imposing debt deflation and austerity on industry as well as on labor.
Failure of Western economies to recover from the 2008 crisis is leading to a revival of Marxist advocacy. The alternative to socialist reform is stagnation and a relapse into neofeudal financial and monopoly privileges.
Socialism flowered in the 19th century as a program to reform capitalism by raising labor’s status and living standards, with a widening range of public services and subsidies to make economies more efficient. Reformers hoped to promote this evolution by extending voting rights to the working population at large.
Ricardo’s discussion of land rent led early industrial capitalists to oppose Europe’s hereditary landlord class. But despite democratic political reform, the world has un-taxed land rent and is still grappling with the problem of how to keep housing affordable instead of siphoning off rent to a landlord class – more recently transmuted into mortgage interest paid to banks by owners who pledge the rental value for loans. Most bank lending today is for real estate mortgages. The effect is to bid up land prices toward the point where the entire rental value is paid as interest. This threatens to be a problem for socialist China as well as for capitalist economies.
www.socialisteconomist.com/...
As Sraffa reminds us, in classical political economy the 'law' of diminishing returns was associated mainly with the problem of rent (theory of distribution), while the 'law' of increasing returns was associated with the division of labour, that is, with general economic progress (theory of production).
Marshall, and other neoclassical economists, attempted to merge these 'laws' into a single 'law' of non-proportional returns, utilizing it in the field of price theory to establish a functional connection between costs and quantity produced. This relationship constituted the basis of the rising supply curve as opposed to the corresponding downward-sloping demand curve derived from the 'law' of diminishing marginal utility. Sraffa admitted that changes in the level of production in one industry can lead to changes in unit cost. However, as he showed, these changes derive from causes that also have an influence on costs in other industries (the existence of scarce factors of production for decreasing returns and economies of scale for increasing returns). Consequently, changes in the costs of the industry in question will mean changes in costs of comparable size in other industries, and cannot be considered in isolation as Marshall does with his partial equilibrium method.
prabook.com/…
Rent-seeking can include piracy, lobbying the government or even just giving away money. Imagine a thriving sea trade in which ships carrying cargo receive a 20% profit on the value of the goods.
Rent-seeking is a concept in economics that states that an individual or an entity seeks to increase their own wealth without creating any benefits or wealth to the society. Gross National Product Gross National Product (GNP) is a measure of the value of all goods and services produced by a country's residents and businesses.
The Tableau is like a tract of land., is like a mathematical matrix...
They (Christian Gehrke and Heinz Kurz) find two crucial parallels between Marx and the physiocrats: first, both present a view of a capitalist economy that originates in a theory of surplus value; and second, each presents a view of the economy in terms of a flow of value through various sets of hands. The tableau represent this flow visually and arithmetically, and Marx's schemes of simple reproduction do so algebraically.
The foundation of modern political economy, whose business is the analysis of capitalist production, is the conception of the value of labour-power as something fixed, as a given magnitude -- as indeed it is in practice in each particular case. The minimum of wages therefore correctly forms the pivotal point of Physiocratic theory. They were able to establish this although they had not yet recognised the nature of value itself, because this value of labour-power is manifested in the price of the necessary means of subsistence, hence in a sum of definite use-values. (TSV 1:45)
And in fact, the authors think this is fundamental for Marx's advocacy for the labor theory of value:
To Marx the labour theory of value was not fundamental in the sense that it was considered 'true' independently of whether it served the purpose of providing a logically coherent foundation of the theory of income distribution. Marx endorsed the labour theory of value precisely because be was convinced that it would offer that foundation, that is, allow one to elaborate a logically unassailable theory of the general rate of profit. He held the physiocrats in high esteem also because it was another achievement of theirs which he thought had paved the way to the development of such a theory. The achievement under consideration is the Tableau economique. (62) "Karl Marx on physiocracy" by Christian Gehrke and Heinz Kurz understandingsociety.blogspot.com/...
As noted in the comments, the above also shares the oversimplification of the marginalist approach that dominates pedagogical approaches. What counts less is about the rents themselves than the financialization structure than manipulates loan debts much like the causes of the last major recession and disenfranchises disproportionately loan costs for poorer and more diverse populations.
Half of the cross-sectional correlation between location foreclosure rates and market share of high cost lenders is explained by borrower observables, and only a modest portion of the remaining correlation can be explained by observable loan terms, lender or location. We develop a shift share measure to capture changes in high cost lender market representation across origination years and find that foreclosure rates are explained by the representation of high cost lenders among those mortgages. Further analyses suggest servicer behavior in response to rising, localized foreclosure rates, rather than unobservable borrower or loan attributes, as an explanation for these remaining effects.
www.nber.org/...
Japanese scholarship has led research in some ecosocialist areas because of the interpretation of concepts like ground rent.
Kei EHARA researchmap.jp/...
Reconstructing Marxian Theory of Ground Rent: Based on Japanese Development of Marxian Political Economy seikeishi.com/…
Ehara, K. (2021). Reconstructing Marxian Theory of Ground Rent: Based on Japanese Development of Marxian Political Economy.
(P. 10-11)
There occurs a class struggle between the capitalist and the landowner over the formation of absolute rent. Absolute rent indicates the strong bargaining power exerted by the landowning class, just as high wages are the fruit of collective bargaining of the workers against capitalists. Capitalists are keen to undermine the alliance of landowners in order to reduce rent. The trajectory of the struggle should be followed by historical and empirical studies. Marxian class analysis thus covers not only the capital-labour relation but also the capital-land relation. By investigating absolute rent as such, we eventually can grasp how “all three classes – wage labourers, industrial capitalists, and landowners” constitute “together, and in their mutual opposition, the framework of modern society.”30 Indeed, in the final part of Capital Vol.3, Marx maintains “[c]apital –profit, land – ground rent, labour – wages, this is the trinity formula which comprises all the secrets of the social production process.”31 Revealing these “secrets” is one of the aims of Marxian political economy and should include a careful examination of the interrelations of “the trinity formula”.
Nevertheless, the class relation between the capitalist and the landowner has not been fully studied. While there are tremendous amounts of studies of (the) capital-labour relation, we have paid too small attention to the landowning system under capitalism. This is not only because absolute rent has not gained much interest, as we have discussed above, but also the rent theory has not been sufficiently formulated. As we have not clarified how the product of the land is used in other sectors, we cannot know what kinds of effects are caused by the change in the amount of rent. If we consider the change in absolute rent as the indicator of class relation, we should investigate how its effect spreads in the capitalist economy. Mathematical formulation has greatly proceeded regarding the theory of prices of production. This includes the formulation of input-output structure of social reproduction. Marx himself contributed to it by examining reproduction schema in Capital Vol.2, yet it is not used when he discusses the prices of production.32 Through the dispute over the “transformation problem”, Marxian economists become used to the analysis of price equations with input-output relations. Nevertheless, most of the discussions are devoted to the relationship between value and price, as the most important issue to be addressed was the “transformation problem”. The price equation was not applied as much to other topics of Marxian economics, including rent theory.
[...]
In this vein, the loss of absolute rent in one sector can result in the loss of rent in another sector. The decrease in rent can bring a chain reaction. The landowners in our example, therefore, seek for an intersectoral alliance to protect interest as the landowning class. The capitalists are, on the other, eager to diminish the power of the landowners extended over the sectors. We can thus observe the class struggle between the capitalist and the landowner in rent theory that is reinvestigated by the price equations.35
(P.14)
We assume the above reconstruction contributes to further understanding of the following quotation from Capital Vol.3, which has provoked a heated debate over Marxian ecology: It [large landed property] thereby creates conditions which cause an irreparable break [Riß] in the coherence of social interchange [Stoffwechsel] prescribed by the natural laws of life. As a result, the vitality of the soil is squandered, and this prodigality is carried by commerce far beyond the borders of a particular state (Liebig).48This recognition of the “metabolic rift” or ,,Riß des Stoffwechsels“ has been emphasized by ecological Marxists, while anti-Marxists condemn the lack of systematic view of ecological issues in Marx’s theory. Ecological Marxists have devoted great effort to show the coherence of Marx’s ecological thought in this argument. Nevertheless, in order to complete ecological Marxism, we consider it indispensable to finish Marxian rent theory as a critical standpoint of studying the landed property system under capitalist mode of production. True, the “prodigality is carried by commerce”, viz. by the capitalist. However, it is not “capitalist mode of production” itself but “large landed property” that Marx deems causes the “metabolic rift”. It is here necessary to clarify how landowners as well as capitalists take part in the exploitation ofnature.49 This study must be at the same time consistent with Marxian analysis of class struggle. We believe (that) Japanese long discussions of rent theory give us a clue to solving this conundrum.
seikeishi.com/...
economicsfromthetopdown.com/…
Are you aware that Ian has his own version of the LTV based on his diagnosis of conceptual errors in the classical LTV?I have my own disagreements with Ian, but the last time I witnessed you two talk, I observed you fail to attend to points Ian made more often than vice versa.
Any LTV must still answer basic questions about how to reduce labor time to a common unit, and how to distinguish between which labor is productive and which is not. I have never seen an argument about how to make these decisions objectively.
1/4: And here I think we have another point that shows rival philosophical perspectives, rather than as you have it, one view that is scientific and one that is not. The LTV comes from classical economics and is concerned with the macro rather than the micro view of the economy.
2/4: The macro view is really about sectoral views; it's the lacuna that you identified that it kind of falls apart when you try to apply it outside this domain. But "works only within a domain" is far from the same as "doesn't work".
3/4: And here is the first of a few points that occurred to me that suggests to me a less aggressive approach might pay off: Ian has observed that your comments on hierarchy are complementary to his Marxist view.
4/4: If you can cast light outside the LTV's domain of validity while agreeing with it within it, that suggests the complementarity can be extended beyond this sociological harmony
What is the purpose of a "theory of value" that isn't capable of explaining value in a way that is objectively measurable? Is it even a theory? Perhaps LTV is just an assertion of moral rights, as it was when Locke made it?
Capitalism is denominated in prices, which value theories try to anchor in a process of their choice (utility, labour, social power, energy, etc.). The degree to which their explanatory process is observable/measurable is crucial scientifically but redundant ideologically.
Marxists don’t need the LTV to score the ideological point, but clinging to the LTV just lends marginal utility theory (which is deifferent than expected utility theory and has likewise been empirically proven false) whatever legitimacy it still has. Both are bogus.
1/3: The first refutations of marginalism came from a Marxist, Sraffa, whose value theory he seems to have thought was some sort of LTV, but I guess most economic historians today would say was not.
@mentions2/3: There are Marxists who adhere to the LTV, Marxists who reject it, and those who are not Marxists, such as myself, who think the LTV still has something to offer.
@mentions3/3: With respect to marginalism, too much is made of its refutation. I do not believe that most mainstream economists who publish in prestigious econ journals actually believe that wages are determined by the marginal productivity of labour.
• • •
Carolina Alves @cacrisalves
Replying to @cacrisalves
We don't. The two theories share the same armchair foundations.
1/4: This critique starts with cheap armchair criticism. Marx did not declare the LTV to be true ex cathedra, he made some subtle adjustments to the existing LTV of Ricardo. And he looked at a lot of production data before making his adjustments.
2/4: Your essay does go on to make a substantial criticism, namely the chaos when we look at individual commodity markets. But your exposition of Marx's LTV is an oversimplification that fails to mention the transformation problem.
3/4: If you didn't approach the question as one in which your group have the true light and all outgroups are frauds, you might realise that this is an opportunity for a dialogue.
-
@mentionsAre you aware that Ian has his own version of the LTV based on his diagnosis of conceptual errors in the classical LTV?
I have my own disagreements with Ian, but the last time I witnessed you two talk, I observed you fail to attend to points Ian made more often than vice versa.
The analysis of the commodity has shown that it is something twofold, use-value and value. Hence in order for a thing to possess commodity-form, it must possess a twofold form, the form of a use-value and the form of value. The form of use-value is the form of the commodity’s body itself, iron, linen, etc., its tangible, sensible form of existence. This is the natural form (Naturalform) of the commodity. As opposed to this the value-form (Wertform) of the commodity is its social form.
Now how is the value of a commodity expressed? Thus how does it acquire a form of appearance of its own? Through the relation of different commodities. In order correctly to analyse the form contained in such a relation we must proceed from the simplest, most undeveloped shape (Gestalt). The simplest relation of the commodity is obviously its relation to a single other commodity, no matter which one. Hence the relation of two commodities furnishes the simplest value-expression for a commodity.
www.marxists.org/…
The first essay, ‘Marx Reads Object-Oriented Ontology’, is by Žižek, Professor at the Institute of Sociology, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and perhaps the most famous living philosopher. Žižek is particularly notable for his unexpected juxtapositions of Marxist–Hegelian philosophy with Lacan and popular culture. Here, he brings in Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology (a term coined by Levi Bryant), a recent neo-Heideggerian movement that overturns the primacy of subjects over objects and anthropocentric correlations of cognitive content with external reality to consider objects in other terms than human perception, praxis or activity (real vs. sensual objects). Žižek approaches this debate critically from the perspective of a philosopher whose analysis privileges subject–object dialectics. Yet, whatever the merits of object-oriented ontology may be, Žižek’s continued reliance on a subject–object ontology limits his ability here to offer genuine alternatives. He attempts to reconstitute subject–object relations performatively as they appear to themselves, while their ‘“material base” is just a neuronal–biological apparatus’ (p. 50). Yet, he is trapped within this same restrictive opposition. Still, within this opposition, his claims remain interesting.
- The first concerns normativity. In his account, communism functions through the activity of involved subjects, yet its normativity requires that they treat the norms constituted by subjective activity as objective, and thus, as universal givens, despite the fact that those norms were freely, and thus contingently, enacted by autonomous subjects. Žižek’s virtual philosophy of ‘as if’ makes psychological sense even if it sounds suspiciously like Sartrean bad faith, treating as objective what one knows is subjective.
- A second interesting claim is that Hegel should be read as a thinker of antagonism, rather than as a reductive universalist. Just as John Burbidge has argued that Hegel’s absolute knowing is precisely the recognition of the necessarily relational, contingent or differential character of thinking, Žižek argues that the true or the totality is inherently defined as the whole by its contradictory, antagonistic, inconsistent nature (p. 44), and the necessary by its ineradicable contingency (p. 53). The key is that to forget the antagonisms – the radical core of emancipatory potential in a movement – is to lose that dimension that enables transcendence of the historical impossibility of a given time-bound moment.
Land rent does have its subjectivity, why else would we confer such status on the social construction of home and house ownership.
The conclusion of the essay, that Harman’s object-oriented ontology lacks the ability to articulate anything but passive subjects, is less valuable as a critique, because the demerits of thinking about persons as subjects are well-known and transcend the Lacanian critique. Nietzsche argued that subject–object thinking is inadequate both for its failure to interrogate the nature of thinking, the primacy of consciousness, and the nature of the self, and its reliance on the contingent metaphysics of grammar. Heidegger similarly argued to the tertiary character of subject–object relations, which he subordinated to the ontological difference, logos, and the synthesis–diaeresis of the logos apophantikos or demonstrative language. A first step in moving Hegelian–Marxist dialectics into the sphere of the contemporary for the purposes of advancing emancipatory discourse would be to think beyond capitalist subjects and objects in the constitution of such discourses in a more complex, concrete, and historically specific approach to human identity. Perhaps this thinking beyond and through subject–object dialectics would enable a more incisive rending of the veil than Žižek’s example of seeing a reality through inhuman eyes in the unintended vision of the actors playing Siegmund and Sieglinde, still lying in an embrace behind a curtain suddenly parted after the end of Act I of Die Walküre (p. 52).
link.springer.com/…
Sieglinde
(in highest excitement tears herself away
and stands before him.)
Art thou Siegmund, standing before me?
Sieglinde am I, who for thee longed:
thine own twin sister thou winnest at once
with the sword!
(She throws herself on his breast.)
Siegmund
Bride and sister
be to thy brother:
then flourish the Wälsungs for aye!
(He draws her to him with passionate fervor. The
curtain falls rapidly.)
www.murashev.com/...üre_libretto_English_German
Enclosing the land
In medieval times farming was based on large fields, known as open fields, in which individual yeomen or tenant farmers cultivated scattered strips of land. From as early as the 12th century, however, agricultural land was enclosed. This meant that holdings were consolidated into individually-owned or rented fields. Usually, it was seen as a more economical way of farming, and became increasingly common during the Tudor period.
Enclosure by Act
Originally, enclosures of land took place through informal agreement. But during the 17th century the practice developed of obtaining authorisation by an Act of Parliament. Initiatives to enclose came either from landowners hoping to maximise rental from their estates, or from tenant farmers anxious to improve their farms.
From the 1750s enclosure by parliamentary Act became the norm. Overall, between 1604 and 1914 over 5,200 enclosure Bills were enacted by Parliament which related to just over a fifth of the total area of England, amounting to some 6.8 million acres.
Agricultural use
There is little doubt that enclosure greatly improved the agricultural productivity of farms from the late 18th century by bringing more land into effective agricultural use. It also brought considerable change to the local landscape.
Where there were once large, communal open fields, land was now hedged and fenced off, and old boundaries disappeared. But historians remain divided over the extent to which enclosure forced those at the lowest end of rural society, the agricultural labourers, to leave the land permanently to seek work in the towns.
www.parliament.uk/...
In economics, land refers to those elements of wealth and means of production that are the products of nature rather than human labor. Since land is not produced by human labor, it has by definition no value. Since capital is made up of commodity values—most importantly the commodity labor power and money, which is also in the final analysis a commodity—unimproved land is not capital.
Landed property is therefore a social relationship of production—in legal language a form of property mediated by unimproved land—different from capital. A person who owns land, as opposed to a capitalist, is a landowner.
However, improvements in land that are the result of human labor applied to land do have value and function as commodities and capital. In the real world, the improvements in land are bound up with its natural properties and can be difficult to separate. But in economics, we must use abstraction to separate those things that in the real world are bound up with each other. Therefore, the category of unimproved land as opposed to landed property is extremely important in economics.
[...]
In the earlier stages of capitalism, the landowners often formed a class separate and distinct from the capitalist class. Even then in practice, the landlords owned some capital—often landed capital—and the capitalists owned some land. The income from ownership of unimproved land is called ground rent and represents a part of the surplus value produced by the working class.
As capitalism develops and the remains of feudal and other pre-capitalist relationships are dissolved, the tendency is for the same persons who play the economic role of capitalists to also play the economic role of landlords. Feudal property gives way to capitalist real estate (2)
[...]
While classical political economy developed the theory of differential rent, Marx introduced the category of absolute rent. As we saw above, the individual price of production of the capitalist farmer on the poorest land—the margin—determines the market price of that produce. But since the poorest land yields no super-profit, there is no rent for the landowner. However, what will happen if the landlords rent out only part of the poorest land?
In that case, there will not be enough produce on the market to lower the price of produce all the way down to the individual price of production of the produce produced on the worst land. Instead, Marx assumes that it will only lower it to the value—or direct price—of the produce produced on the worst land. Remember, Marx assumed that the organic composition of capital invested in agriculture has a lower organic composition than average. Consequently, its price of production is lower than the price that directly expresses its value.
Market value
If the landlords by holding back some of their worst lands can raise the price of the produce to the point where the market price is equal to the price that directly expresses the individual value of the produce produced on the worst land, that individual value will rule the market value. Therefore, the individual direct price of the produce produced on the worst land will determine the market price of all the produce of a given type and quality under the given conditions of production.
Absolute rent defined
Marx defined absolute rent as the difference between the individual value, or more strictly the direct price of produce produced on the worst land (6), and its individual price of production. This absolute rent is then collected by the landlord, which once again reduces the rate of profit of the capitalists using the worst land to the average rate of profit.
Unlike the case with differential rent, absolute rent can be abolished if ownership (of) the land is transferred to the capitalist state—which is not the same thing as ownership of land by the community. If the state takes over ownership of the land, the government if it wishes can rent the poorest land to capitalist farmers for nothing. If it does so, this will lower the price of produce to the individual price of production on the poorest land. Absolute rent then disappears.
The ‘price’ of land
Since unimproved land is not a commodity, how can land have a price? Remember, price is the form that the value of a commodity takes. How can something that is not a product of human labor have a price? Actually, the price of land is not really a price but is rather a form of rent. But how is rent transformed into what appears as the “price of land”?
Men on the Land: death and revolt from enclosures.
Bryer, Rob. “THE ROOTS OF MODERN CAPITALISM: A MARXIST ACCOUNTING HISTORY OF THE ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES OF CAPITALIST LANDLORDS IN ENGLAND.” The Accounting Historians Journal, vol. 31, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1–56. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40698292.
Kett's Rebellion was a revolt in Norfolk, England during the reign of Edward VI, largely in response to the enclosure of land. It began at Wymondham on 8 July 1549 with a group of rebels destroying fences that had been put up by wealthy landowners. One of their targets was yeoman Robert Kett who, instead of resisting the rebels, agreed to their demands and offered to lead them. Kett and his forces, joined by recruits from Norwich and the surrounding countryside and numbering some 16,000, set up camp on Mousehold Heath to the north-east of the city on 12 July. The rebels stormed Norwich on 29 July and took the city. On 1 August the rebels defeated a Royal Army led by the Marquess of Northampton who had been sent by the government to suppress the uprising. Kett's rebellion ended on 27 August when the rebels were defeated by an army under the leadership of the Earl of Warwick at the Battle of Dussindale. Kett was captured, held in the Tower of London, tried for treason, and hanged from the walls of Norwich Castle on 7 December 1549.
en.wikipedia.org/...
2/7economy, even though it is a major contributor to reported GDP. As the article points out, "real estate contributes to about 29% of China’s economic output if its wider influences are factored in, according to a joint research by Harvard University and Tsinghua University".
3/7This is the part that I think most analysts still fail to grasp. After all these years they treat this activity as if it continued to be as economically valuable in China as it had been two decades ago, and as it would be in other countries, and yet Beijing clearly isn't...
4/7acting as if it still believed that it is.
And Beijing is right: the fact that the debt associated with this kind of investment has been rising so much faster than its GDP contribution over the past 10-15 years is prima facie evidence of malinvestment.
5/7What's more, when analysts argue that China will be able to maintain its high-investment growth strategy because it has promised to shift all of the existing malinvestment into productive areas, like the high-tech sector, they obviously haven't done the math, or understood...
6/7what drives China's investment process, nor have they looked at the historical precedents and wondered why the same promise, made in every previous case in recent history, always proved impossible to fulfill. The amount of bad investment in Chinese infrastructure and...
7/7property easily overwhelms the amount of investment that can be productively absorbed by the high tech sector or other parts of the economy, even if we assume that there are no frictional costs (above all political costs) to engineering such a shift.
The power suddenly blows and Collins enters with handfuls of cash, revealing that he reprogrammed an ATM at a grocery store to provide money to anybody with the code 'ANGEL'. Maureen and Joanne abruptly enter carrying Mimi, who had been homeless and is now weak and close to death. She begins to fade, telling Roger that she loves him ("Finale"). Roger tells her to hold on as he plays her the song he wrote for her, revealing the depth of his feelings for her ("Your Eyes"). Mimi appears to die, but abruptly awakens, claiming to have been heading into a white light before a vision of Angel appeared, telling her to go back and stay with Roger. The remaining friends gather together in a final moment of shared happiness and resolve to enjoy whatever time they have left with each other, affirming that there is "no day but today" ("Finale B").[21]
en.wikipedia.org/...