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As I see it, the errors in Keynes's analysis in Chapter Two of the General Theorv were his acceptance of diminishing returns in the short-period relation between output and labor employed and of perfect competition in the product market. These "errors," however, are easily corrected and do not alter Keynes's basic and correct ideas -- that employment is determined by aggregate demand, that real wages are determined by aggregate demand given the degree of competition and the level of capital utilization and other determinants of the productivity of labor, and that the supply of labor, at least below full employment, has no effect on either employment or real wages. I would like to reiterate that the formulation we have established here is "Ricardian" rather than neoclassical. Basically all we have said is that the mark-up represents a deduction from the product of labor and that since the mark-up is certainly not procyclical and productivity probably is procyclical, as the "margin" of production is extended, real wages rise. Sraffa (1960, pp. v-vi) has argued that such a use of the term "marginal" is spurious, since the true application of the term "requires attention to be focused on change," while this use of the term, as in Ricardo's discussion of the margin of cultivation, need only be a matter of differences in quality among existing productive facilities rather than changes in scale or in input proportions. We have come a long way from the neoclassical idea of a marginal product of labor, but this should not make either us or Keynes embarrassed about Chapter Two of the General Theory, one of the most interesting and important chapters in the book. Lawlor, Darity, and Horn (1987) noted that Sraffa (1926) had pointed out that the determination of prices and quantities by the interaction of supply and demand necessitates an independence between supply and demand which does not obtain except under very restrictive conditions. Sraffa (1960) extends this argument by showing that scarcity, as in scarce factors of production, is not necessary to determine value and in fact cannot determine value independently of income distribution. Keynes's and Kalecki's work shows that when we take effective demand into account, output is determined solely by demand and distribution by the conditions of competition. Kalecki's and Keynes's work can thus be taken as an Hegelian "supersession" of classical and neoclassical economics when we realize that workers cannot bargain in terms of a real wage and that output not saleable will soon no longer be produced.
This introductory text on labour economics covers topics such as: the shift in America from a manufacturing-based economy to a service economy; the changes in the economic conditions in the US; the implications of NAFTA and GATT; and the labour markets.
The rise in the share of labor costs invalue added in many industrial countries during the 1970s and early 1980s has led many observers to conclude that real wages are now too high and a source of "classical" unemployment. These conclusions are not necessarily valid. The increase in the labor share could be warranted by long-run changes in production techniques, in the price of energy, or in the relative availability of labor and capital. This paper uses a production function approach to examine these possibilities
This volume seeks to go beyond the microeconomic view of wages as a cost having negative consequences on a given firm, to consider the positive macroeconomic dynamics associated with wages as a major component of aggregate demand.