AynCrap

... you guessed it, smashing in some windows... Reuters carry a video report about the protests as a whole including what the protesters are actually protesting. France 24 reporter Aurure Dupuis gives some info about anarchists in Paris during an otherwise peaceful protest back in April this year. Indeed those peaceful protesters were upset by the violence of the anarchists. Oh well. Maybe direct action and insurrection aren't all they're cracked up to be. Early this march the BBC reported on the protests , which included such inteeresting and ultimately quite harmless things as schoolkids barricading their schools. Amusing as these measures were, a later report included video of miscreants marring an otherwise peaceful march in Paris. Al Jazeera offers a similar line to the BBC - overal peaceful, marred by a few bad apples. Naturally The Guardian offers a childlike ignorance of basic economics in its coverage of the issue of labour law in France, but still toes th...

Alas, in the end I never found comprehensive, annual labour time data, so I settled with something less rigorous but hopefully capable of making the point. The data I was able to bring together I used to create the chart below showing change in GDP per capita versus change in hours worked per year per employed person, with the latter acting as my way of calculating Marxian SNLT. You can now have a look-see for any strong, lasting corelations between the two. I chose per capita figures to remove any noise from the GDP growth figures, by which I mean GDP growth from population growth. In a discussion about something that is compiled in such a way as to offer a per capita dataset anyway, as labour time records are, you might as well skip aggregate GDP and go straight to the per capita stuff. I extrapolated change data from the static data in the sources because the static data are not in comparable/commensurable units, whereas the change data are both percentages, making the compar...

While signing out of my emails today I happened upon some nooze. A UK schoolgirl died because healthcare professionals misdiagnosed her condition . This would happen sans the NHS. This would happen in a free market. But it also happens in a planned healthcare industry. McDonalds folks are talking about automating their customer-facing functions, and a UK-based media outlet is finally bothering to report on it. And speaking of minimum wages, in Venezuela the government has raised the minimum to assure the success of the glorious Bolivarian Revolution.

I'm trying to find year-by-year work-year data for the United States for a paper I'm working on that compares change in work hours per year, which I define as socially necessary labour time per year, and change in GDP per capita per year. Thus I can see for myself what correlation if any exists between labour time and GDP... Anybody wanna help me find some damned data? All I have so far are partial sets that start in 1870 and offer decadal numbers, not annual ones.

In the parallel up-is-down psycho-world of anarchist 'economics' one can find such gems as the assertion that free market capitalism is not the foremost reason for Hong Kong's rapid move from universal subsistence to near-universal affluence from 1950 to 2000, by which point the country was wealthier per-capita than the UK. [ 1 ] The basis for this case is two-fold; the government of Hong Kong owns title to almost all of the land within its borders and the LegCo members have a lot of cosy relationships with folks in business. On the face of it these seem very practical points. They are certainly both true, but there's something missing here. On the first point, government control of land is a key factor in the absurdly high house prices in Hong Kong. Linda Yueh wrote for the BBC in January 2014 that house prices in Hong Kong averaged 13-times Hong Kongers' annual incomes. [ 2 ] In a similar vein Yvonne Liu commented in January 2014 on the city-state being ranke...

Below is a table of annual GDP data for the United States that I have shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia. I am rather irritated that it has taken me as long as it did to find historical GDP data going back before the 80's. Why this is a massive challenge (as in the OECD, IMF and World Bank websites have no easily accessible historical GDP data) in 2016 is beyond me. Anyway. United States Annual Economic Data [257] Year GDP Nominal ($ billions) GDP Adjusted ($ billions) Population (millions) GDP per capita Nominal ($) GDP per capita Adjusted ($) 1790 0.19 3.60 3.929 48 916 1791 0.21 3.82 4.048 52 944 1792 0.22 4.10 4.171 53 983 1793 0.25 4.43 4.297 58 1031 1794 0.31 5.00 4.428 70 1129 1795 0.38 5.31 4.562 83 1164 1796 0.41 5.47 4.700 87 1164 1797 0.41 5.57 4.843 85 1150 1798 0.41 5.80 4.990 82 1162 1799 0.44 6.20 5.141 86 1206 1800 0.48 6.55 5.297 91 1237 1801 0.51 6.87 5.486 93 1252 1802 0.45 7.09 5.679 79 1248 1803 0.48 7.21 5.872 82 1228 1804 0.53 7.49...