ABSTRACT

The ‘Goodwin pattern’ — an anti-clockwise rotation in real activity × wage share space recurring at intervals that correspond roughly to the duration of business cycles — is an enduring feature of high-frequency dynamics in capitalist economies. It is well known that the centre or focus of this rotation shifts over time. More recently, however, the Goodwin pattern seems to have broken down, the wage share no longer increasing as the real economy improves over the course of short-term booms. In this paper, the apparent breakdown of the Goodwin pattern is associated with the consolidation of an ‘incomes policy based on fear’ that is part-and-parcel of neoliberalism. As a result of this incomes policy based on fear, the institutional structure of the labour market disciplines labour at any rate of unemployment. This decouples wage-share dynamics from the state of the real economy, with the result that as recently witnessed in the US, the wage share is rendered invariant to improvements in economic performance over the course of short-term cyclical booms.

摘要

“古德温模式”——实际活动的逆时针旋转×工资份额空间以大致对应于商业周期持续时间的时间间隔重复出现——是资本主义经济高频动态的持久特征。众所周知，这种旋转的中心或焦点会随着时间而改变。然而，最近，古德温模式似乎已经崩溃，随着实体经济在短期繁荣过程中的改善，工资份额不再增加。在本文中，古德温模式的明显崩溃与巩固新自由主义的“基于恐惧的收入政策”有关。由于这种基于恐惧的收入政策，劳动力市场的制度结构以任何失业率约束劳动力。