Ken Carlile wrote:
>It is now clear how nonsensical, indeed ideological, are
>attempts to quantify the general rate of profit at a specific
>time. Events surrounding Enron and other capitalist
>corporations highlight the unreliability of profit returns
>made by this capitalist enterprises.
The second claim is of course valid, if not exactly novel. But it does not
provide grounds for the first assertion.
There is no reason to suppose that biases in accounting data are all one
way. Enterprises have strong incentives to *minimise* reported profits, not
exaggerate them -- one obvious one is tax, but another is avoidance of
pressure for higher wages from their employees.
(One might also add that a more subtle way for dishonest executives to rob
shareholders would be to report smaller-than-actual profits and make off
with the difference. The Enron method -- steal the money, and report it as
profit -- seems calculated to advance, rather than postpone, the eventual
day of reckoning.)
Given that enterprises face multiple and opposing pressures to distort their
accounts, statistical methods clearly have a role in estimating the general
rate of profit (and other statistics) from company accounting data.
Indeed, this is exactly the nature of my own research (details on
application...)
Ken goes on to claim that:
>Indeed the entire activity of econometrics etc is a dubious,
>even ideological, activity designed to misconceive the nature
>of capitalism.
There's certainly much that can be queried in what one might call
"actually-existing econometrics" (which afaik is mostly
methodologically-naive regression analysis).
But that's not the same thing as saying that all empirical, quantitative
research is in fact, let alone necessarily so, ideological.
Julian
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