The Growth of Unproductive Activities, the Rate of Profit, and the Phase-Change of the U.S. Economy

Dimitris Paitaridis and Lefteris Tsoulfidis ()
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Dimitris Paitaridis: University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2012, vol. 44, issue 2, 213-233

Abstract: This paper by using the categories of productive and unproductive labor and by extending and further elaborating the data series utilized in Shaikh and Tonak (1994) reveals a sharp expansion of the unproductive activities in the U.S. economy during the period 1964-2007. The combination of growing productivity and the stagnant or even falling real wages of productive workers increased the rate of surplus value in the recent decades to unprecedented highs. As a consequence, the general rate of profit from the early 1980s onwards was also rising until the last years of our analysis; meanwhile the net rate of profit remained at levels much lower than those of the 1960s and the slightly rising trend during the post-1980s has been already reversed. The patterns of these crucial variables reveal startling similarities with the onset of the slowdown that started in the mid- to late 1960s.JEL classification: B5, E1, O51

Keywords: unproductive labor; surplus value; rate of profit; U.S. economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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