One year ago, November 11, 2010, I uploaded Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line [embedded below the fold] to Scribd. Since that date it has received 3,823 "reads" with an average engagement of 6 minutes and 17 seconds for a grand total of 400 hours and 21 minutes of reading.
Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line
Pages
- Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line
- Time on the Ledger: Social Accounting for the “Goo...
- Intermediate Goods and Duplication
- The Long Term Problem of Full Employment
- The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties...
- Grundrisse: "Capital (like property) rests on prod...
- Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: "W...
- McCulloch on Combination Laws
- Submission to the White House Task Force on Middle...
- Thinking Along the Right Lines
- The Problem with "The Problem of Social Cost"
- State and Prospects of Manufactures
There's no comments section in the Time on the Ledger blog, but I should note that social accounting should differentiate between hours allocated and spent on productive work, and hours allocated and spent on unproductive work. My mention of Value Product, Material Product System, and Net Material Product was in reference to the Soviet, not American, flaw in social accounting: the biggest items missing from their social accounting pertained to the military and military-industrial complex.
ReplyDeleteYes, Nick, you're right with regard to the aggregate or macro level, such as the GDP. This was Kuznets's point in his 1948 article on the Commerce Department's NIPA report. My spreadsheet deals only with the microeconomics. Military spending wasn't the only flaw in Soviet accounting. They also permitted state-owned enterprises to count inventory as if it was revenue. See "The Rhetoric of Accounting in Poland: will the expert be on tap or on top" http://www.docin.com/p-91689573.html
ReplyDeleteEven after the 1965 reforms, inventory was counted as "revenue"? I know that, before then, finished goods on hand, spoiled goods, inventory-in-rework, and scrap all counted towards production targets, but that inventory-as-revenue treatment seems to be an absurd confusion of Surplus Value with Profit.
ReplyDeleteI can't really answer that, Nick. I relied on the authors of the "Rhetoric of Accounting." I'm not an authority myself on socialist accounting.
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