Month: August 2019

Marx

~300 words, ~2 min reading time

Summary

This short chapter summarizes some of what came before, and also makes clearer the main purpose: Marx was trying to show that the rate of profit is typically not independent of the size of the capital involved. This view (which Marx attributes to the German socialist Rodbertus) claims that capital and profit levels move in lock-step – so a 20% increase in capital and 20% increase in profit would go together, so that the rate of profit would be unaffected. Marx claims that this is true in only two cases: First, if there’s a change in the value of the monetary commodity. In that case, it’s not really that capital and profit are both increasing by 20%, it’s that gold (or the dollar or whatever) is decreasing in value by 20%. So, here, there is actually no “real” (inflation adjusted) change in either capital or profit – only in its nominal (money) value. Second, if variable and constant capital move in lock-step, so that the ratio between the two does not change. (In modern terms, economists would say that the enterprise is changing by “replication”, a simple repeating of the same process an extra time, half a time or whatever.)

Why It Matters

Marx’s view of distribution and cycles are closely tied with the fact that there is a connection between capital accumulation and the rate of profit, I suspect. So, this is going to play a bigger role when we reach that point.

Where Marx Goes Wrong

Here, Marx’s comments are few enough, and mostly in the form of a recap and application against Rodbertus that I don’t have any specific objections that wouldn’t show up elsewhere.

Fitness Friday – My Current Workout and Why

~700 words, ~4 min reading time

So, it’s been a little while since I described my workout routine, and I’ve made some changes to it. So, let’s get into it.

Trait #1: Full Body Split

So, there are a number of ways to do splits – though the science seems to have come around to 2-3x a week per muscle group being the most effective. So, that basically means you want to do full body 2-3 days a week, upper-lower 4-6 days a week, or push-pull-legs 6 days a week.

I have other things to do, so that means full body 2-3 days a week.

Though the reason I switched back to this from other routines was simple: I can’t guarantee getting time to workout 4+ days a week, so if I miss a day, that pushes things way off schedule if I’m in a U/L or PPL routine. However, with a full-body routine, it can just mean that I take an extra rest day. I likely won’t end up accidentally having 5 days between training a particular body part.

Trait #2: 6 x 12 as my target set/rep scheme

The science seems to suggest that you get maximum hypertrophy (that is, muscle growth) from doing 40-70 reps over 6-10 sets in a workout for a specific body part. You can do this using one or two exercises. To minimize rest time, six sets makes sense. So, that means we should do 7-12 reps in a set. So, I target 12, and if I fall short odds are good that I’ll still get at least 7.

I also use this 40-70 rep scheme to add sets (up to a max of 10) if I do fall short. Basically, if I’m failing to hit my 12 reps per set, I continue doing sets until either I hit 40 reps total OR 10 sets total.

However, the last set is special. More on that further down

EXCEPTION: I do 3×12 as my target for squats and deadlifts. Because I hate them, and find doing more to be excessively fatiguing and terribly demotivating.

Trait #3: A/B workouts

This is the most recent change. For a while, I was just doing the same full body routine 3 days a week (ideally). But, I realized that I kind of wanted to do both rows AND pullups – both back exercises. But, I didn’t really want to do more than 6 exercises in a single workout. So, I alternate between these now:

Workout A: Dumbbell Floor Presses, Dumbbell Squats, Lateral Raises, One-Arm Dumbbell Rows, Standing Tricep Extensions (though I do a dumbbell in each hand to force the two arms to work independently), Dumbbell Bicep Curls

Workout B: Dumbbell Flyes, Stiff-Legged Dumbbell Deadlifts, Dumbbell Shoulder Presses , Pull-ups, Lying Tricep Extensions, Hammer Curl

Trait #4: Autoregulatory Progression

Progression is a key element of an effective routine. I’m of the opinion that a reasonable progression scheme can cover up a number of other errors – in particular about “how much to lift” when you start out. There are lots of ways to do this, but I finally came across something I like: Autoregulatory Progressive Resistance.

I mentioned above that I target 6 x 12. Now, often, I will fall short of this. That’s fine. But, on the weeks that I manage to get 12 reps in each of the first 5 sets, I do as many reps as I can in the 6th set. This determines if I progress the weight. If I get 13 or fewer in that set, I keep the weight the same. If I get 14-17, I increase weight by ~5%, if possible (for curls, for example, I’m lifting so little that I can’t really increase by less than 10%). If I get 18 or more, I increase weight by ~10%.

In the event that I don’t hit 12 reps per set, then I just try to do better the next time, with no strict progression scheme except that I want to improve the first set that fell short of 12 reps by at least one rep next time around.

“The Science”

Based on this article which summarizes research from others, cited there.


Marx

~420 words, ~3 min reading time

Summary

In this chapter, Marx considers the effects of variations in various prices on the rate of profit. First, raw materials. As one might expect, there is an inverse relationship between raw material prices and the rate of profit. Thus, low material prices are important to capitalists maintaining profit levels. Marx explains that this is true, even though changes in the prices of raw materials tend to be reflected in the price of the product. Because of competition, the change in cost is typically not fully reflected in the price of the final good. In the case of wages, higher wages tend to decrease both the rate of surplus value (which decreases the rate of profit), and also tend to decrease the capitalist’s scope of production – further decreasing profit. One of the more interesting observations Marx makes in this chapter is that there is a tendency in capitalism for the growth of the stock of machinery to run ahead of the ability of nature to produce nature-given factors (like agricultural goods, for example), and this creates imbalances that lead to cyclical fluctuations. Marx specifically considers cotton markets, showing how there was a repeated boom and bust in that industry in England through the mid-1800s.

Why It Matters

In this chapter, Marx hints that a good part of the instability of the capitalist system that he will explain later rests on the relationship between the prices of the factors of production and the rate of profit.

Where Marx Goes Wrong

From a modern mainstream or Austrian perspective, Marx’s analysis here isn’t “wrong” in one sense – but is wrong in another. On the one hand, from an individual firm’s perspective, Marx’s analysis of the effect of prices of factors on the rate of profit is fairly sound. But, from the perspective of the economy as a whole, we have the problem that the prices of factors of production are not exogenous. They depend on the (expected) price of the product. Value is then imputed back from the product to the factors that produce it. In mainstream terms, the demand for the factors of production is “derived” from the demand for the product. So, the causal analysis, if we’re trying to analyze the system as a whole, is backwards – UNLESS we’re considering cases where the price is changing because of a change in availability of the goods under consideration, but Marx isn’t very clear about that (though there are certainly places where he considers these cases).