R. Walker, "Putting Capital In Its Place" (1999)

(264) ability to pay high wages = 1. productivity + 2. w-class capacity + 3. politics of labour (social contract, etc.) + 4. profit on investment + 5. condition of place

(264) we are very far from living in a low-cost world--still serious c-tendencies

(266) there are place-specific assets

(267) obv--not all industry has moved to Haiti, yet

(268) agglomeration economies

(269) cheap labour competition is an issue, but a minor one

(269-270) what matters are unit costs: wages x productivity (Germany at 80% of Us, Japan at 50% of US in 1980s)

(272) It's the success of the NIC's that has raised the spectre of 'cheap labour'

(273-274) immigration is a small proportion of the labour force; except in exceptional cases, difficult to see how they could bring down wages (think, also, that immigration to US was highest during first boom, and was cut off only in the 20s)

(277) low-road capitalisms have done well, on occasion, but never matched records of their high road rivals

(278) investment drives productivity growth (w/o determining it entirely, of course)

(279) Japan went to SE Asia (partly) in reaction to US attempts to protect domestic manufacturing in 1985

(280) servioces grew most because the rate of profit there has held up the best

(280) overcapacity in the world economy as fundamental cause of slowdown

 (281) for Europe and Japan post-WWII, not high nor low road, but 'divided highway' (i.e., some of their competitive advantage did come from low wage costs)
 

Walker, "A Requiem for Corporate Geography" (1989)

(44) Myrdal's influence on location theory through concept of 'cumulative causation'

(46) in contrast to classic theory, the calculus of large firms is basically indistinguishable from small firms [part of the attempt to recenter discussions on the economy/capitalism, away from firm parameters]

(47) organizational characteristics also don't change parameters of firm calculus (again, beyond corporate geography)

(50) corporate goegraphers promote 'industrial organization' over processes of industrialization [reminder that you can't escape capitalism]

(53) neoclassicals smuugle everythin in through the back door--everything important that affects/defines production is exogenous to their model, in effect

(53) 'efficacy' vs. 'cost efficiency'

(57) wide variety of organizational forms can work

(60) against 'uneven development', no notion of fixed hierarchy of places

(62-63) 'affection for petty bourgeois palliatives (i.e., small business, etc.)--need, in short, for a more "capacious socialist agenda"

 

walker, "geography of production" (2000)

(14) including everything manufacture-like not classified as such, estimates are 40-50% of total labour force

(119) skyscrapers as 20th century's 'dark satanic mills'

(119) workplace integration presents various advantages, but doesn't mean you need River Rouge -- 'importance of factory as a business strategy' diminishing..

(120) "no single best solution" [the problem, here, is that this becomes just a nice way of saying you have nothing to say]

(123) industrial location is not about pre-given costs, but about creating systems of innovation, etc.

(126) technological development has its own logic, dependent on the industry/sector (i.e., mechanization in agriculture is different from mechanization in healthcare)

justice as equality, christopher ake (1975)

(71) justice is to be understood as complete equality in benefits and burdens (it can, of course, be traded for other social virtues)

(76-77) Barry's critiqeu of Rawls: difference principle is not about justice, exclusively, but actually incorporates considerations of welfare [the whole 'better off' bit]

(80) crux of the argument is that justice comes apart from other considerations; and that it absorbs common distributive maxims

(81) friend who finds book? reward only the one who found it, or the one who looked without finidng it? only the former, but this is because it's competition within the rules of a contest

(86) intentions matter to the extent that they reflect burdens borne [the danger, in all this, is that Ake's argument simply narrows what we use 'justice' to describe, w/o actually assisting in any solution to the problem of how to arrange institutions to fit intuitions]

(88) effort and need are not opposed criteria, on this conception--both are burdens that people bear

parasites, pimps, and capitalists: a naturalistic conception of exploitation, tommie shelby (2002)

(382) defending a nonmoral notion of exploitation

(389) 'outcome' model of parasitism--paraiste benefits, host is harmed vs. process model of parasitism--parasite scrounges on host's foraging efforts (i.e., distribution of benefits vs. how exploiters obtain benefits)

(393) 'basic structure of exploitation' (BSE): (a) if Y forced to make sacrifice which benefits X; (b) X obtains this advantage by virtue of some power over Y

(394-395) defining 'harm'/'sacrifice'  -- it can't be the case that it's only exploitation of the exploited gets no benefit, because there are examples of exploitative relationships in which the exploited gets some benefit (i.e., a wage, a gig, etc.) [seems to me you'll have to introduce some kind of counterfactual notion]

(397-398) the cause of compulsion need not be another agent--compulsion by circumstance can lead to 'opportunistic' compulsion [vs. Nozick]

(403) does Shaq exploit his opponents?

(403) domination and exploitation can come apart, at times

(404) for the MArxist concept, exploitative relationships need to be self-reproducing. in other words, add (c) to BSE's (a) and (b). (c) being that the relationship persists and is essential to reproduction

(408) sum of SER in Marxist terms [Shelby cashing this out w/o the LTV]

(412) surplus appropriation can be non-exploitative provided tht benefits don't accrue b/c of a group's power over productive resources

(413) conditions of SER (forced to do surplus labour) can be product of compulsion by circumstance, for sure

(413) opportunistic exploiters (capitalists who benefit from workers' double-freedom) vs. coercive exploiters (added dimensions of the pimp-prostitute relationship, etc.)

(416) three kinds of Marxist approaches to the problem of exploitaiton: (a) distributive, that exploitation unjustly distributes some important good; (b) principled, that exploitation violates some important principle; (c) nonmoral, which Shelby is arguing we should take seriously [the claim, again, is not that this undermines the moral critique of Marxists, just that the fact of exploitation can be established independent of its evaluation]

GA Cohen, Nozick and Wilt Chamberlain: How Patterns Preserve Liberty (1977)

(5) Nozick vs. Socialism: (1) Liberty is justice; (2) Socialism is incompatible w/ liberty [Cohen is going to agree w/ (1) and reject (2), whereas most take the tack of rejecting (2) but accepting (1)]

(7) for Nozick, 'voluntary self-enslavement' is not unjust [which has an appeal on our intuitions]

(8) key, the desires have to be somewhat sensible--the person can't be making an uninformed or coerced decision; it's disturbing if the decision is being made on false pretenses

(9) this begins to undermine the applicability of Nozick's principle to market-generated state of affairs [important, I think, also to stress the conditions under which the cdecision is being made]

(14) arguing re: change in human nature, under socialism [not the way to go]

(16) Nozick's argument prohibits any and all limitations on freedom (it's not a maximizing freedom argument). Justified via Kant

(19) Nozick: a person is not forced if all other people ar not focing [can't conceive of compulsion by circumstance]

(20) Farmer's fence and the villager example (the question, again, is whose freedom/liberty is being supported/maximized)

(21) if Z is unfree, then justice and freedom actually come apart (in other words he has to acknowledge, then, he's defending the freedom of a particular class as 'justice')

GA Cohen, LTV and explotiation

(338, thesis): don't need LTV ("mutual irrelevance"

(340) the substantive thesis of volume 1 is that (3) socially necessary labour time determines 'equilibrium price' (whether or not the definitional claim is (1) socially necessary labour time is value; or (2) value is equilibrium price)

(340) LTV does not give you LT of surplus-value

(341) nice, pithy statement of the 'origin of non-wage income'--""the difference between the value of labor power and the value produced by him/her in whom it inheres. it is the difference between the amount of time it takes to produce what is needed to keep a producer in being for a certain period and the amount of time he spends producing during that period"

(343) Traditional Marxist Argument leaves its moral premises unstates: (1) that one is entitled to the fruits of one's labour; (b) that one is 'forced' to enter into this relation

(344) You can drop the LT of SV from the account, because all you need is for the capitalist to accumulated some of the value produced by the worker for the TMA to be coherent

(346) strict vs. popular doctrine of LTV (hinging on whether labour is source of all value--can't be, if 'past labour' is involved)

(349) the objective here is to puncutre the 'pop idea of creating value', to show that, even according to LTV, labour does not create value

(352) Marx vs. Ricardo is a 'popular' distinction,

(354) exploitation is not about appropriation of value, but about the appropriation of the product

(354-355) Recall only labour is a producer (which is different from saying that labour is responsible for the production of all value) (take lending you a knife, as an example--productive activity vs. producing activity)

(356) Simpler Marxist Argument drops claims about (a) all value being created by labour; (b) value being what's appropriated

sachs and shatz, "trade and jobs in US manufacturing" (1994)

(3,4) sum of findings is that trade matters, but doesn't explain most of the job loss

(5) macroec summary (good data)

(5) Krugman and Lawrence say the 'trade --> decline in manufacturing' argument is spurious; for them, it's a success of productivity story [use]; this is generally correct, but the 70s and 80s were particularly sharp declines--an 'unexplained gap' of about 3 million jobs. the final estimate is that about 1.2 million of these job losses are explained by trade. 

(7) growing inequality between skilled and unskilled is an 80s phenomenon

(9) international trade would matter through putting pressure on output prices

(11) consistent with timing of trade with developing countries

(15) did lead to job losses [though this is rooted in what seems to me to be a particularly naive view of the labour market]

(16) capital flight (remember, trade model assumes immobile capital)

(17) table of skill deciles (ranked by ratio of productive/nonproductive workers)

(18) the US' basic relation with developing countries--the US exports h-skill, imports l-skioll

(21) w/ low wage countries trade is interindustry, w/ high wage countries intra-industry

(21) and because of this, lower job losses expected according to skill intensity [don't quite grasp logic]

(23) '78-'91, tarriffs were more intense on l-skill than high-skill industries; this pattern became slightly stronger in '91 than in '78

(25) decline in employment was clearly greatest in 'low-skill' secotrs

(23) skill-intensity of production rises in every decile

(26) employment fell most in (a) low skill sectors; (b) capital-intensive sectors [collinearity problems?]; fell least in (a) high-skill sectors

(28) c-factual model: rise in net imports resulted in 7.2 and 2.1 % job loss from developing countries

(30) certain industries experience declines unrelated to trade shifts (steel, in particular)

(34) Wood: "understating job loss by using average skill-intensity". but showing that this is not borne out by data

(34) manufacturing trends can't explain income inequality in US (mainly because of hos small a fraction of LF is in manufacturing)

(36-37) effective prices in low-skill goods fell vs. not fell (Sachs vs. Lawrence/Slaughter)

(40-41) Biased technical change--increase in proportion of skilled to nonskilled [v. strange assertion that this might raise the relative wage of low-skilled  workers--assuming full employment + all gains to worker?]

(44) TNC-based trade declined w/ developing countries, raised w/ developed countrieds

(46) factors that drive trade (can't trade w/ poor countries)

(52) China-US trade details

(54) wage gap at outset of trading ties was enormous! (1.9% of US wages)