Showdown at the HM Corral

By Andrew Kliman

On Duménil and Lévy’s Cherry Picking of the Data

At last month’s Historical Materialism conference, Duménil denied that they cherry picked the data.  I replied. Then we showed what the facts of the matter are.

In these pages and elsewhere, I’ve cited Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy’s cherry picking of the data as one reason why they contend that the rate of profit of U.S. corporations experienced an almost complete recovery since the early 1980s. This claim is crucial to their argument that the current economic crisis began as a financial crisis that was not itself rooted in a long-term fall in the rate of profit. Read More

Cherry Picking Peaks and Troughs

Why Marxist Economists Dismiss Marx’s Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit

By Andrew Kliman, Author of Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital“: A refutation of the myth of inconsistency.

As I noted in a post last month, some prominent Marxist economists-including Fred Moseley and Gérard Duménil-have recently asserted that the rate of profit in the U.S. has recovered from the fall it underwent through 1982.  Therefore, they contend, Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit is of little value, if any, when trying to explain the roots of the current economic crisis.  Instead, they attribute the crisis to financial-sector phenomena -which they portray as largely unrelated to and separable from movements in profitability. Read More