Profitability and Its Determinants: Operationalizing the ‘Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall’ in the US Economy, 1950–2020
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This analysis seeks to demonstrate the theoretical and empirical salience of the ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ in relation to the concrete evolution of the US economy between 1950 and 2020. The theoretical-methodological approach adopted in this study is based on the work of Shane Mage and Murray E.G. Smith. This approach re-specifies the Marxian value categories and ratios for purposes of empirically operationalizing them as a theory of fundamental capitalist dynamics using national accounting data. Contributions include (1) the treatment of systemically necessary unproductive labour as a ‘constant capital overhead cost’ and (2) a method of managing ‘fictitious profits’ that are imputed into the national accounts and thereby enabling a more realistic estimate of ‘social surplus value’ (the numerator of the Marxian average rate of profit) in what has become an ‘era of fictitious capital’. The empirical findings reveal a persistent rise in the organic composition of capital, as well as a rise in the rate of surplus value, accompanied by a long-term downward trend in the average rate of profit in the postwar US economy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".