A model of labor-constrained accumulation and economically directed technical progress has a stable steady state at which the class distribution of income is invariant with respect to population and saving parameters yet sensitive to workers' stances in wage bargaining and to the tax and transfer policies of a redistributive state.
I first characterize a moral mistake in coercion. The principle of independence with which I criticize coercion seems also to condemn exchange. I propose an account of exchange from which it follows that exchange upholds independence after all. In support of that account I argue that, of the accounts of exchange that occur to me, only this one has the consequence that, on general assumptions, a person can take part in exchange while acting, intending, and believing with sufficient reason. I argue that the hiring of very poor people by very rich people for labor from which the rich draw a substantial surplus does not give rise to an exchange of this kind. These instances of the wage labor relation resemble coercion insofar as they violate independence.
The equalization of profit rates across industries subject to firm-level bargaining over wages generates an interindustry wage structure with higher wages in capital-intensive sectors. The familiar inverse wage-profit relation gives way to a wage-wage-. . . -wage-profit surface on which the profit rate can vary directly with the wage paid in an individual industry. Institutional changes that decrease workers' bargaining power and increase the incomes of the unemployed tend to compress the wage distribution; these changes draw political support from cross-class coalitions of low-wage workers and capitalintensive firms. Some capital-using, labor-saving technical changes that raise capitalists' profits in current prices lower the equilibrium profit rate.me ca_355 537..559
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