Sunday, January 02, 2011

What do bosses do? Part II

Just knocked off the second installment of the "what do bosses do?" series from Stephen Marglin:

"Whatever qualifications may be necessary to explain deviations from the norm, my hypothesis remains that capitalists as individuals, like workers, save principally when their incomes rise faster than they can manage to spend them. On a statistical basis capitalists may save a significantly larger portion of their disposable incomes than do workers, and for many purposes there may be adequate justification for reflecting this statistical regularity in the postulate that saving propensity is a matter of income class. But this does not in itself contradict the disequilibrium hypothesis: successfull workers become capitalists and failed capitalists become workers; the differences in savings rates are thus accountable in terms of income changes. In my view the significant dichotomy with respect to savings rates is not based on differences in individual incomes, but on the differences between individuals and organizations. It is not the size of the capitalists' income or a special set of attitudes, a drive towards accumulation, that matters. It is rather capitalist control of the production process that gives this class a dominant role in determining the rate of saving."

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