Demand, Production, and the Determinants of Distribution: A Caveat on "Wage-Led Growth"

The incomes of workers and capitalists pertain to different moments of accumulation. Wages are shares of capital outlays sustaining production; profits are shares of commodity sales. If aggregate demand and the scale of productive undertakings are shaped with a measure of mutual autonomy, the class distribution of income and the measure of economic activity are jointly determined by the same processes. In those settings “wage-led growth” has neither analytical nor policy purchase as associations between wage shares and levels of output (or growth) are confounded consequences of distinct effects on each measure of broader developments in the economy. A more appropriate dichotomy is that between “investment-led” and “consumption-led” growth, with the former resulting in comparatively higher wage shares. After advancing and illustrating these points, this paper motivates its approach to class income flows and the role of demand--which draw on the Circuit of Capital--in relation to the equivalent Kaleckian approaches sustaining arguments for “wage-led growth”

Credit, Profitability and Instability: A Strictly Structural Approach

This paper offers a purely structural characterisation of the content, limits and contradictions of credit relations in capitalist accumulation. Considering steady-state evolutions and step-change perturbations in a dynamic model of the Marxian circuit of capital, it establishes that sustained paces of net credit extension may boost aggregate profitability, the rate of accumulation, and the aggregate financial robustness of capitalist enterprises. These gains are limited by the economy’s dynamic productive capacities, and tempered by the risks of credit and monetary disruptions created payment obligations established by credit. Economies with higher paces of net credit extension are shown to be more vulnerable to the disruptions to accumulation variously emphasised by Marxian, Keynesian and Post-Keynesian contributions.

El Capital Financiero: Herramienta de Trabajo Analítica

This essay offers an instrumental assessment of Finance Capital guided by the goal of conceptualizing the social relations and contradictions of contemporary finance as it has emerged from these changes. It does so by offering contemporary interpretations of two particularly useful analytical tools originally offered by Hilferding: His methodological approach to the relationship between financial and industrial capital, and the identification of ‘founders’ profit’ as a peculiar mode of appropriation arising from capital-market competition. These two contributions offer a rich conceptual toolkit to tackle financial relations, as they exist today

By the Content of their Character? Discrimination, Social Identity, and Observed Distributions of Income

This paper develops a series of information-theoretic measures to consider the systemic effects on individual incomes of complex patterns of social and economic discrimination by race, ethnicity, and gender, in the U.S. It derives coefficients of joint, conditional or incremental, and mutual information that offer non-parametric characterizations of the relative influence of economic and social-identity characteristics in the determination of individual income for different groups. It reports on estimates of those coefficients obtained using large-scale cross- sectional data from that economy. Those estimates support two sets of conclusions. First, the informational significance of social identity in the determination of incomes differs clearly and persistently across social-identity groups. For some groups social identity exerts a significant informational influence in the determination of income. Other groups enjoy greater scopes for individual differentiation by factors other than social identity. Second, the informational influence of educational attainment on income is deeply shaped by social identity. Among other expressions of this, the paper finds that some identity groups see the comparative measure of informational association between their incomes and educational attainment rise steadily with levels of educational attainment. In contrast, other groups see those comparative measures fall as educational attainment rises. These observations point to the economic effects systems of discrimination impose on certain groups, and to the relative privileges enjoyed by those not subjected to them

Indices of Informational Association and Analysis of Complex Socio-Economic Systems

This paper is motivated by a distinctive appreciation of the difficulties posed by quantitative observational inquiry into complex social and economic systems. It develops ordinary and piecewise indices of joint and incremental informational association that enable robust approaches to a common problem in social inquiry: grappling with associations between a quantity of interest and two distinct sets of co-variates taking values over large numbers of individuals. The distinct analytical usefulness of these indices is illustrated with their application to inquiry into the systemic economic effects of patterns of discrimination by social identity in the U.S. economy

On the Content of Banking in Contemporary Capitalism

Abstract 1 Th is paper considers the character and social content of banking in contemporary capitalism. Based on a survey of the operations of nine leading international banks, it documents the marked diff erences between contemporary banking and the traditional business of taking, making loans to enterprises, and making profi ts from the diff erence in interest-rates between them. Notably, the operations of the world's top banking organisations are shown to centre on various forms of credit to individual wage-earners and on mediating access to fi nancial markets by corporations and, increasingly, individuals. In order to characterise the social content of such activities, the paper seeks to apply, and where necessary extend, existing Marxist analyses of banking, capitalmarkets, and their relationship to capitalist accumulation. Th is includes advancing a number of elements of a distinctive Marxist interpretation of capital-market operations to theorise fi nancialmarket mediation-relations between banks, corporations, and the mass of retail-savers. Th e analysis pursued helps identify the distinctive and exploitative content of the relations banks maintain with ordinary wage-earners through consumer-and mortgage-lending, as well as through the provision of pension-related saving services

Failure Evaluation of Reinforced Concrete Beams Using Damage Mechanics and Classical Laminate Theory

The prediction of the behavior of reinforced concrete beams under bending is essential for the perfect design of these elements. Usually, the classical models do not incorporate the physical nonlinear behavior of concrete under tension and compression, which can underestimate the deformations in the structural element under short and long-term loads. In the present work, a variational formulation based on the Finite Element Method is presented to predict the flexural behavior of reinforced concrete beams. The physical nonlinearity due cracking of concrete is considered by utilization of damage concept in the definition of constitutive models, and the lamination theory it is used in discretization of section cross of beams. In the layered approach, the reinforced concrete element is formulated as a laminated composite that consists of thin layers, of concrete or steel that has been modeled as elasticperfectly plastic material. The comparison of numerical load-displacement results with experimental results found in the literature demonstrates a good approximation of the model and validates the application of the damage model in the Classical Laminate Theory to predict mechanical failure of reinforced concrete beam. The results obtained by the numerical model indicated a variation in the stress–strain behavior of each beam, while for under-reinforced beams, the compressive stresses did not reach the peak stress but the stress–strain behavior was observed in the nonlinear regime at failure, for the other beams, the concrete had reached its ultimate strain, and the beam’s neutral axis was close to the centroid of the cross-section

Granulocytic sarcoma of the oral cavity in a chronic myeloid leukemia patient : an unusual presentation

Intraoral granulocytic sarcoma is an unusual manifestation of chronic or acute leukemia. The oral manifestations often involve enlargements of the gingival and mucosal tissue from direct leukemic cell infiltration. Only 38 cases have been reported in scientific literature to date. We present the case of a 47 year-old female who was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in December 2006. She was referred to a dentist for further evaluation, revealing generalized gingival overgrowth as well as periodontal, apical disease, and bleeding of the gums. An oral biopsy was performed and histological features revealed immature blast-like cells

Precarious work and methodological challenges to study hard-to-reach populations

OBJECTIVE: To describe the methodological challenges and strategies of a web survey on the working conditions and health among delivery workers. METHODS:The study population consisted of Brazilian delivery workers operating in the national territory. Procedures include building solid and ongoing collaboration with worker representatives and conducting a four-month data collection from February to May 2022, sharing the link to the online questionnaire on social media such as social networks (Facebook, Instagram) and messaging apps (WhatsApp, Telegram). RESULTS: The recruitment of 41 leaders or influencers of delivery workers increased the dissemination of the study, some of whom participated in the consensual validation of the questionnaire; the production of content for social media for the dissemination of the questionnaire link on social networks and applications, and the in-person dissemination of the study at the delivery workers’ meeting points during the workday played a fundamental role, totaling around 132 hours in 45 shifts. The strategies adopted for data collection with a hybrid approach to dissemination made it possible to carry out the web survey. After four months of the web survey, 564 delivery workers, 543 men and 18 women, responded to the online questionnaire.CONCLUSION: The web survey presented methodological strategies to overcome the challenge of reaching workers, including hybrid work, to increase the participation of workers, on whom epidemiological research is still scarce.</p