I've been taking a class with Dr. Erik Reinert and one of the theories he brought up to explain the recent financial crisis. Marx wrote that ideally capitalist take money, use it to create a product, then sell the product for more money. However, over time capitalist will try to find ways to take money and make more money without actually making a product. This is where the recent financial crisis comes in. Financial institutions were making money, but no one was actually producing anything.
Financial institutions aren't necessarily bad, manufacturing needs financial support. The problem comes when the financial institutions stop serving a supporting role and become the primary target of investment. NPR actually had an interesting interview a couple of weeks ago with a financial expert who gave a great example of this, I recommend listening to the podcast. He worked for an airline, wherein, after awhile, the only profitable department was the accounting department. But instead of investing those profits into becoming a better and more competitive airline, they essentially became a bank.
Reinert brought this up as the Real Economy versus the Financial Economy, which made me curious to see if there was a way to measure when the tipping point is reached. It's actually relatively easy to find the breakdown of contributions to the US GDP, but there's the problem of definitions. Does the Real Economy include only manufacturing or should it also include agriculture, mining, and services? Does it also include the government? Instead of looking for a definition, I'm just going to compare various different qualities I found when looking at the figures.
The data I have goes back to 1947, so it is interesting to see how things have changed over time. From 1947 until 1968, manufacturing made up over 25% of the GDP. During that same period, finance went from 10.5% to 14%. Finance surpassed manufacturing in 1986. By 2009, finance was nearly double manufacturing at 21.5% and 11.2% respectively. The numbers are a little better in 2010 and there's been some hopeful signs of an increase in manufacturing, but it's hard to call a one year improvement a trend. So overall, by 2009, finance was nearly double manufacturing, made up 25% of the private economy, and 21.5% of the total economy. It would be interesting to see if there was a similar run up in the 1920's, unfortunately there is not much information available that far back. I could look at other countries that have undergone recent financial crises, but their crises were rooted in other problems, so they might not be comparable (also Japan breaks down contributions to GDP differently than the US).
While looking at the data, I found some other interesting trends. Construction is strongly cyclical. It is currently at its lowest level ever at 3.4%, after falling from 4.9% back in 2006. Mining (includes oil) is also cyclical, but over a longer time period. The early 1980's are especially interesting as there's a sudden rise and decline in oil production. Up until 2008, all manufacturing sectors were in relative decline except for electronics, electrical equipment, and petroleum products. Transportation has been in continuous decline, but this is largely a good thing as it means that transportation costs are lower as the demand for transportation certainly isn't lower than it was in 1947. In the financial sector, the only contribution to show a relative decline over the past decade is securities, commodities, and investments, which is probably a good indication of what the financial sector wasn't doing during the 2000's. Health care has greatly increased since 1947, going from 1.5% to 7.6%.
One part I found of particular interest was government spending. Overall government spending makes up 13.4% of the GDP. A lot has been made lately of government spending, and it is going up as a portion of GDP, it is still lower than it was at any point between 1961 and 1995. Government spending peaked in 1971, during the Vietnam War, at 15.3% and was in decline up until 2001. Of course that's overall spending. State and local government spending has actually been steady around 9% since 1990 meaning most of the relative decline in government spending has come from the the federal government which has been declining from 7.8% in 1952 to 4.3% in 2010.
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