Understanding and Controlling a Law of Advancing Capitalism

摘要

This paper refines a general model of capitalist reproduction. A compact state-space form of this model defines a hypothetical Law of capital accumulation. The state variables are the relative wage, employment ratio, gross unit rent, man-made capital-output ratio, natural capital-output ratio and indicated natural capital-output ratio. This paper identifies unobservable components of this Law through an application of the extended Kalman filtering to the US macroeconomic data. The retrospective statistical analysis (1958-99), univariate sensitivity analysis (1999-2057) and forecasting (1999-2507) support the analytical treatment of this Law. The latter ceases to impose itself as a blind force upon the human-beings and becomes more controllable stochastically. It is shown that the capital accumulation in the USA is a non-equilibrium quasi-periodic process described metaphorically as a long wave.