Technical Change, Accumulation and the Rate of Profit Revisited

Recent work has drawn attention to the connection between technical change and the labor market. Reasonable assumptions concerning both the reality of positive capital accumulation and the effect of technical change on wage rates reveal the ubiquitous possibility of viable technical changes that raise the composition of capital and lower the rate of profit. A complete non-steady-state growth model including both optimal technical change and labor-market dynamics is described; the model provides a test of the empirical likelihood of an accumulation path with a rising profit share and falling profit rate. A general perspective on the existence and role of critical tendencies in capitalist economic growth is presented.