Elephant on a skateboard - S Artesian

1. Love and Infamy

The bourgeoisie, the one we know and don’t love so well, thinks it has the solution to the problems it knows and doesn’t love inherent in the accumulation of capital. The solution for everything and anything that besets capital is of course…. more capital. The solution to the problems of too little return on capital, and too little capital is more capital. The solution to the problem of too much capital, of more capital is even more capital, but relatively.
Capital, for our well-known unloved capitalist, does not mean production. It does not mean creating products, or creating the means for creating products, or creating the means for creating the means. For our capitalist, capital means only the expansion of value.
Our capitalist doesn’t mean production even when he or she says “production.” Our capitalist doesn’t mean product even when he or she says “product.” Our capitalist does not mean productivity even when he or she says “productivity.”
For our well-known unloved capitalist, product means value, production means the process of aggrandizing value, productivity means increasing the rate of aggrandizement.
For our unloved, well-known capitalist, productivity is mis-represented as the productivity of capital, which is just our capitalist’s way of taking over a quality that is alien to him or her, and to his or her property; a quality that is alienated from labor. All and everything the capitalist means is proportionately greater aggrandizement of value output per unit of input, with the input itself being measured by, existing as, value. There’s the pot, the gold, and the rainbow all wrapped into one.
So whenever capital expands, the expansion is the result of the “productivity” of capital; of improved efficiency; of optimized allocations; of rationalized resources.
Whenever capital recovers, the recovery is the result of productivity, of improved efficiency, of optimized allocations, of rationalized resources.
When capital contracts? Here our chest and tub thumping capitalist is brought up short, literally and metaphorically. If expansion and recovery are the result of improvement, optimization, productivity, rationalization—in a word “progress,” in another word “capital”—how could anything as irrational as contraction, as recession, devaluation, and depression, even occur?
When Marx, known and beloved, says reproduction he means the renewal of the circuit, the process by which labor is transformed into value. When he says expanded reproduction he means the reconversion of the surplus value aggrandized by the capitalists into the components for capitalist production for the aggrandizement of more labor. When he says accumulation, he means that the expanded reproduction requires the introduction of relatively greater amounts of machinery as value into the production process.
When Marx analyzes accumulation, he is analyzing a single process, a totality where both expansion and contraction are the result; where the sub-optimal, inefficient, irrational, unproductive moments and structure of capital are the result of the optimal, efficient, rational, magnified “productivity” of capital.
Capital itself, whether in flower or withering on the vine, has no productivity. It assumes, expropriates the productivity of labor through the command of labor time.

2. Materialism and History

Marx initiates his critique, his engagement through opposition, of capital after his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Hegel, in this last published work, becomes the object lesson of his own definition of
liberalism as a philosophy of the abstract that capitulates to the world of the concrete. Hegel’s dialectic of reason, dialectic through negation, had reached its end, and become a veritable negation of reason. The state is an abstraction. The abstraction embodies reason. The real embodies the rational, and becomes the end to rationality. Rather than being the product and producer of history, no longer representing the sojourn of consciousness through history, the real and the rational abandon history.
Marx’s critique recognizes that Hegel’s philosophy relates a history of human beings making themselves “at home” in the world, but that the philosophy is an estranged representation of an estranged history. Hegel gives us a disavowal of reality. The dialectic of negation, conflict, opposition, antagonism becomes the affirmation of things as they are.
Marx identifies the real material by which human beings make themselves at home in the world; retrieves the real content of history, and extracts that rational kernel of the dialectic—the kernel of opposition, conflict, antagonism. That material of human history, that basis for the kernel of the dialectic is the labor process. The labor process is that activity where human beings appropriate nature and make themselves at home in the world of not entirely their own making.
The appropriation of nature through labor is a social process. The appropriation is mediated by the forms of society. Appropriation of nature, then, is simultaneously the appropriation of the labor itself. Labor creates itself and the forms in which the labor is organized, rendered, captured. The forms of capture are the different forms of private ownership, of property. If Hegel is presenting us with an estranged representation of an estranged history, the estrangement is a reflection of the estrangement in the labor process. Labor creates the conditions for its own reproduction, but only in the reproduction of its expropriation, its loss.
So we get from labor, to the labor process, to the conditions of labor, to the organization of labor as property, to labor producing the conditions for the material reproduction of society.
The conditions of production, the loss that labor imposes on itself, is nothing other than dispossession of labor from its own usefulness in directly meeting, creating, expanding, and satisfying need. Needs can only be met through the mediation of exchange, through the quantifying, the measuring of the single element common to all human labor, which is of course also the essence of history— time.
Labor dispossessed from its individual, particular abilities to provide for the laborer; labor stripped of its use; labor as time; time as the measure for exchange. Labor’s loss is time.
If time is the measure, then absent that bigger fool of whom every capitalist dreams, then the formal exchanges of commodities have to be equal, and fair; they have to be exchanges of time for time.
The reduction of labor to time is only possible because of labor’s capacity to create greater quantities than can be directly consumed. The time of labor is a quality; the quality is the ability of labor to convert itself into material products extending forward in time, beyond its own particular, and immediate, needs; to create surplus; to overproduce.
Labor’s ability to overproduce is precisely what is captured, fixed, by capital in the conversion of labor time into value.
Within the fairness, the equality of exchange of labor for wages, the unequal exchange of quality, time, for quantity takes place. Only a portion of the labor time is compensated, that time necessary for the reproduction of the laborers as a value-producing class; only that portion required for the workers to expand the reproduction of capital.
The more this labor power produces, the relatively less the power of labor; the more this labor power produces, the proportionately less is returned to the laborers; the more this labor power produces, the less the need, use, production and reproduction of labor makes up the value of the products; the more this labor power produces, the more the surplus labor, the surplus product, the surplus value, the overproduction is converted into the property of the capitalist; the more this labor power produces, the more the capital displaces, outweighs labor power in the process of reproduction; the more this labor power produces, the more the productivity of labor is consumed by and converted into the overproduction of capital.
Overproduction, inherent in the organization of labor as wage-labor, is the source and the limit to the aggrandizement of surplus-value. Overproduction is the origin and barrier to profitability. Overproduction is always the overproduction of capital, and is capital’s immanent critique.
The extraction of proportionately greater amounts of surplus labor time through reducing the time necessary for the laborers to reproduce, “work up,” values equal to their own wages, does not, and cannot, increase the new value embodied in the individual commodities, or the value of the commodities in total. Time is time.
Exchange is based on the formal equality of capital’s values, of time for time. The valorisation of capital, its expansion, requires a growing inequality in the exchange between the components internal to capitalist production, an exchange of less time for greater time—of objectified, quantified time for the quality of labor power, its surplus labor time.
Valorisation, expanded reproduction, accumulation, all these are simply manifestations of the conflict that is the heart of capitalism. From the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx gets us to that heart—overproduction.

3. Elephant on a Skateboard

Since 2001, the number of production workers has declined by 21.9 percent in U.S. manufacturing industries. Economists, business school professors, union bureaucrats, journalists, politicians, some of the living junk of this junk bond capitalism, have attributed this decline to capital flight, taxes, regulation, union representation, competition, outsourcing—all of which supposedly restrict, and subvert, the natural, exuberant, uninhibited productivity of capital.
Other economists, other journalists, politicians, union bureaucrats, professors–some of that other junk– point to speculation, “financialization,” outsourcing, capital flight, and competition for the decline in the employment of production workers by “productive” capital.
These tweedledums and tweedledees of capitalism with their twiddling explanations are all of a cloth, and of the cloth. They are peddling the gospel of accumulation, more capital, as the path to increased manufacturing employment. It’s the gospel of the productivity of capital.
In the profane world, the one where money is made, the decline in the numbers of production workers is the direct, and sustained, result of the capital’s reconversion of surplus value into the means of production, into capital that amplifies the productivity of labor. Between 1973 and 1995, manufacturing productivity grew at an average annual rate of 2.7 percent in the United States. Between 1995 and 2007, the average annual rate of growth measured 4.1 percent.
The increase in labor productivity was the result of alterations, adjustment, changes in the production process brought about through the investment in fixed assets —the structures, equipment and software dedicated to production.
Fixed assets, fixed capital refers to those instruments and structure of capitalist production the value of which is transferred to the finished products only incrementally, over extended periods of time, and numerous cycles of production. Marx writes in his volume 2 of Capital:

It is this advance in one sum and the reproduction in natural form by small degrees which distinguishes this capital in the role of fixed from circulating capital.

The essential, distinguishing characteristic, of the investment in fixed capital is that it yields its value only to the degree that its usefulness, its physical capacities are consumed through the labor process. The exchange value of the fixed capital is only preserved through the destruction, depreciation, of its use value, in the labor process, which is the aggrandizement of surplus value, surplus labor time. Value is recuperated only in the slow annihilation, the extinction, of the instrument itself.
The average annual growth in productivity since 1995 is the result of very uneven periods of investment in fixed assets. The increase in manufacturing fixed assets, as measured by historical costs, measured 30 percent in the 1996-2000 period but only 13 percent in the 2000-2008 period. More importantly, the replacement rate, new investment in the stock of fixed assets compared to depreciation [which is the transference of value through the consumption of use value] measured:
167 percent of depreciation in 1996, declining to:
140 percent of depreciation in 2000, before falling in the ensuing recession to:
103 percent of depreciation in 2004, recovering to:
121 percent of depreciation in 2006, never reaching the 2000 rate, much less the 1996 ratio despite increasing to:
125 percent of depreciation in 2007 and 2008.
As profitability was peaking for nonfinancial corporations in the US in 2006, these corporations increased, albeit modestly, their investment in fixed assets.
The asynchronous aspect of the replacement rate investment in fixed assets and profitability is neither ironic nor random. This increase in investment isn’t just bad timing on the part of our bourgeoisie. Rather, the investment in fixed assets brings the hands of the clock, and the profitability of capitalism, down.
It is the essential characteristic of fixed capital that it is advanced, and procured, in a single sum, recuperating its value over repeated cycles of production. While all of the fixed assets are necessary to, and required for the labor process, for reducing the time spent by labor in reproducing the value of its own wages, only portions of the fixed capital participate in the valorisation process, which is the preservation of values through the accretion of more value.
Without a lengthening of the working day, the labor process itself only preserves the value of the fixed capital consumed in production by increasing the physical quantities of finished products, adding nothing more to the total time expended in the conversion of objects into values. Time is time, and 8 or 9 or 10 hours can never be more than itself.
While the extensive application of fixed capital to the production process reduces the time necessary for the reproduction of the value in any individual commodity, including the time necessary for the reproduction of the commodity of labor power, in displacing that labor power, the application of fixed capital lengthens the cycle, the time necessary for the reproduction of the total capital deployed in the production process. This shortening of the particular time needed for reproduction of any commodity extends the space, the volume of commodities, needed to reproduce the value of the commodity of fixed capital; and it extends the time necessary to achieve that reproduction.
Marx writing in the notebooks for his economic manuscripts that are now part of volume 33 of the Collected Works puts it this way:

The fact that the annual returns decline in proportion as the capital advanced, if there is an increase in the part of auxiliary capital consisting of fixed capital, that is if its turnover periods extends over several years—its value only entering into the product annually in the form of depreciation—is not a phenomenon peculiar to agriculture, but a general one.

General it is indeed, to capitalist development. The cycle of reproduction is lengthened by the very means that initially expands profitability, and reduces the time to the realization of profit.
The annual rates of return decline as more capital is accumulated and reintroduced into production. The exchange of fixed capital with wage-labor in the labor process aggrandizes relatively more surplus value, but it is an exchange in the valorisation process which reduces the proportion of capital actually exchanged with wage-labor. The more that capital exchanges of itself with less wage-labor, the relatively less of itself capital exchanges with wage-labor.
Our well-known and unloved capitalist is between the rock and the hard place or in this case…the fixed place. What’s to be done? If our capitalist is first on the block with his new fixed capital, the rock isn’t quite so hard, as the general social time necessary for reproduction will not yet have been altered, and our capitalist can, in essence arbitrage the difference between his or her new, improved reduced cost of production and the general, social, old price of production.
Now it’s in this arbitrage that each and every individual capitalist thinks he or she finds comparative advantage, market superiority. In a word, finds value. This arbitrage allows our unloved capitalist, and more unloved than usual by his competitors, to reroute, channel some of the profit that would flow to his or her unloving competitors into his or her own wallet. The capitalist may think he or she is pocketing the surplus value that has been personally aggrandized, but that’s never the case since, although expropriated privately, value always and only materializes in a social form, as a product of the general, abstract social labor. The arbitrage is always and only the capitalist garnering a portion, a ratio, a rate of that general, social profit.
So what do our other unloved capitalists do, now put between that same rock and the new fixed place? The answer to the problem is the problem itself. More capital. In their social existence as a class, the capitalists do en masse what they try to do individually, which is to apply more capital to production, to the accumulation of capital. In so doing, the arbitrage, the variance between any individual capitalist and the class of capitalists disappears. The arbitrage between any particular cost of production and the general social price of production approaches zero.
Still, in the process of expanded reproduction, it is precisely this moment with capitalists acting as individuals “collectively” that constitutes expansion, growth, development, increased accumulation—those happy days and good times where the future is so bright the bourgeoisie are all wearing sunglasses.
What else can our capitalist do? In reality, the question is not what the capitalist can do, but what the capitalist will/must do to offset this slowing and lengthening of the rates of return. The capitalist can/must/will charge off more to depreciation, but charging off more to depreciation is an accounting trick and has no significance to the actual costs and prices of production.
Moreover, depreciation itself does not account for the loss of accumulated value in the means of production when new mechanisms and methods of greater amplifying the productivity of labor are introduced into the labor process. Then the as yet unrealized, unabsorbed, non-transferred value stored in the old productive apparatus, a value that demanded realization at its purchase, and after purchase exists only in a latent condition to be recuperated, or re-realized, through the transfer to the entire mass of final products, is transformed into a loss. The arbitrage works the other way against our capitalist. It cuts directly across the profitability of current production.
The capitalists can/will/must attempt to function as a cartel to control production and raise, or at least stabilize, prices, thus restoring a bit of arbitrage between production and realization. Yet, raising prices only redirects the total socially available profit to specific sectors and enterprises. It is the opposite identity of the precipitating condition where the variance between the cost of production and the price of production narrowed, where the blades of the capitalist scissors began to close on the throat of accumulation. Now with the attempt at an increase in prices, the capitalists as a class are once again parceling out the socially available profit, and the total rate of accumulation will stagger and slow coincident with the hyper-accumulation realized in one or two particular sectors. Our unloved capitalists call this “stagflation.”
Our capitalist can/will/must attempt to improve the means of communication and the means of transportation in order to measure the market, moved the finished products to the markets more quickly. In short, our capitalist will inject more capital into capitalist production as a whole in order to reduce the time and cost of circulation, circulation being itself the gap, the variance, the arbitrage between production and realization, the domain of price.
Our capitalist can/will/must increase production through either intensification of labor, application of even more capital to the production process. Nothing begets overproduction like the declining returns that are the result of overproduction.
Our capitalist can/will/must push for reductions in wages, and/or the aggrandizement of greater quantities of absolute surplus value, achievable only through a lengthening of the working day.
Surplus value has, upon its, materialization only the most ephemeral of existences. Money is nothing, making more money is everything to our bourgeoisie. The realized surplus value must be moved from money in hand to money out of hand, money seeking its own expansion. That is the diktat of capitalist accumulation.
Our capitalist can/will/must liquidate, sequester, cancel, warehouse, and retire the assets of fixed capital. Liquidation will produce a relative increase in the rate of return through the diminution of the fixed asset base. In addition, forced sales of fixed assets are devaluations which work to reduce the length and number of cycles required to realize the latent value in the assets themselves. There it is! The bourgeoisie have found the perfect solution to the problems of capital that more capital can only reproduce—asset liquidation. The asset liquidation, however, then reproduces that same form of capital with the shortest half-life, cash in hand. Cash in hand is the accumulation of anti-accumulation. It is capital all dressed up with nowhere to go, except right back into contraction.
Ultimately, none of the solutions are; all of them are the manifestations of the conflict between the growth of the social means of production and the private property of the capitalist. Fixed capital is the overproduction at the heart of capital, the conversion of the “overcapacity” of labor power, of the expropriation of surplus time, surplus labor, and surplus value, made solid.

5. Wafer Thin

The nexus of despair and exhilaration, of mania and depression, of fear and greed for our capitalist is that capital lives only in its process of accumulation, in its command of the labor of others. Once accumulated, however, capital has no life, no purpose, nothing to wear, nothing to do, and no place to go, except to dissolve itself back into the process of origination. It is not just that the relationship of capital to the capitalist is as the monster describes his relationship to Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel—“You are my creator, but I am your master. You must obey!”—it is also that wage-labor’s relationship to capital is the complementary opposite, the inverted identity of that relationship: “You are my master, but I am your re-creator. You’re nothing without my obedience.”
The light and life that burn so weakly beneath the mists of value are threatened with extinction in their materialization as more capital.
Our well-known, unloved capitalist undertakes his or her great responsibilities, shoulders these great obligations, carries these great burdens: to buy low and sell high; to seek out, close with, and engage a sucker every minute; to find anew a new and even bigger fool; to conduct a war of all against all; to exploit, expropriate, and otherwise reduce human labor by any and all means. All this weight is endured in the capitalist’s belief that he or she will be able to realize in the markets, will extract from the universe of exchanges, more value than he or she has in fact paid for.
By its very nature, fixed capital precludes the ability of the capitalist to recover the value of the total capital committed to the labor process through the valorisation process in a single cycle of production. If the capitalist could do so, then by definition that investment would no longer be fixed but would part of the circulating capital and the reproduction of capital would require the impossible—replacement of the means of production in their entirety in every single cycle.
Given that all capital cannot be recovered in the immediate cycle of production, but that simultaneously it is possible for the capitalist to bring a portion, a ration, of that fixed capital value to market as part of the cost of production and recover a profit, a price greater than that cost, our capitalist now lives his or her entire life, and life cycle, on the margins —on edge and at the edge over the portions, rations, ratio, rates of return on the total value that is achieved in the differential between the costs of production and the price of production.
All of capitalist economics, of capitalist theorizing, philosophizing, managing, marketing, is about margins. All of these margins are simply the ratios, the relations that capitalism utilizes to keep itself alive; to keep itself half-alive; to keep a half-life.
The margin that means more than most to our capitalist is that of the rate of return on produced assets since that ratio is derived from the ratio of net operating surplus [corporate profits + net interest + income from transfers, royalties etc] to the produced assets [net stock of capital + inventory].
In May, 2009, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis published a study of that rate of return for the years from 1997 through 2007 for US nonfinancial corporation.1 . In 1997, that ROR for US manufacturing corporations peaked at 16.4 percent before sliding to 13.7 percent in 2000. The rate then collapsed to 11.2 percent in 2001, marking the onset of the 2001-2003 contraction.
The mass of the operating surplus actually peaked in 1998, and was above the 1997 mark in 1999. However, the growth of the produced assets exceeded the growth in the mass of the operating surplus. Produced assets increased 14.6 percent between 1997 and 2001.
The recovery from the 2001-2003 contraction saw the ROR peak at 15.2 percent in 2006, declining to 15.1 percent in 2007. Despite being delayed and restricted, capital investment between 2003 and 2007 increased produced assets by 19 percent.
Nowhere did, or does, capital produce itself right out of its glory and right into its misery more blatantly than in the information-communication-technology [ICT] sector. This sector’s rate of return peaked in 1997 at 22 percent, declining to -0.7 percent in 2001, as the produced assets increased 38.6 percent. The recovery of 2003-2007 was hardly anything to email home about, as the ROR peaked in 2005 at 11.7 percent, despite the fact that the ICT sector dramatically reduced its accumulation of produced assets, with the increases amounting to only 15 percent.
While the ICT sector lowered its own expansion of produced assets, capitalism as a whole directs more and more of its accumulation into the means of information and communication, and the “motorized” complement of information and communication, the means of transportation. In 2008, 62 percent of the $679 billion US businesses spent on new equipment was directed towards communication and transportation with $233.5 billion was dedicated to means of communication and information and $185.2 billion in accumulating the means of transportation.
The improvement in communication and transportation reduces the circulation time, which itself is the variance, the gap, between production, the labor process, and exchange, the valorisation process. The means of communication assesses, prepares, and secures [as much as possible] the prospects for exchange. The means of transportation deliver the finished products to the markets where they assume the life, that brief half-life, as commodities.
Our capitalist feels something approximating love when the telephones are ringing and he or she needs more lines. Our capitalist knows something approximating love when the trucks are always out making deliveries and he or she needs more trucks.
But it’s a tough love. In his or her every attempt to improve circulation, to offset the lengthening of the cycle of return brought about by fixed capital, our capitalist can do nothing more than increase the investment in fixed assets.
The “motor” of the information-communication sector is semiconductor fabrication. The cycles of semiconductor fabrication are particularly severe given both the costly investment in the instruments and materials of production, and the rapid pace of technological innovation both in the manufacturing equipment and the processing power of the semiconductor. This lovely/deadly-profitable/unprofitable combination initially brings more powerful semiconductor arrays into the markets at prices well above their actual costs of production, but with lower prices relative to the use value, the “productivity,” the processing power of the previous semiconductor configuration.
Then, as the technological innovation in the semiconductor processing power or the method of semiconductor production proliferates throughout the industry and becomes the “normal” social time of reproduction. Market prices begin their steady decline. Production intensifies as declining prices and processing power enhance consumption. The greater processing power becomes the standard. However, as prices decline, production based on the less advanced technologies becomes unprofitable, and the market moves from furious expansion to overproduction, glut, and contraction.
Technical innovation has becomes overproduction in bulk, because overproduction of the finished product can be nothing other than the result of the overproduction of the means of production as capital. The oversupply of the semiconductors in the markets stands in the same relation to the overproduction of the fixed assets of semiconductor production as that of market prices to value.2 Emerging from the 2001-2003 recession, the equipment utilized in semiconductor fabrication embodied three significant technical innovations: 1) replacement of the 200mm size disc by the 300 mm disc, allowing greater surface area for the building of more chips in a single production cycle. This advance was first introduced in the 1997-1999 period.2) use of .09 micron technology increasing processing power and performance. 3) use of higher conductivity copper interconnects.
As the lower production costs boosted profits, and provided greater processing power, the amplified demand for flash-memory and DRAM chips sustained the use of the older 200mm disc fabrication processes. Meanwhile, capital spending programs accelerated
In 2003, only eight semiconductor fabrication companies registered more than one billion dollars in capital expenditures. In 2005, 15 companies had capital spending programs greater than one billion dollars. In 2006, and again in 2007, 16 companies had programs of more than one billion, with these 16 companies accounting for three-quarters of the entire sector’s capital expenditure.
Despite the fact that sales had peaked in 2007, fabrication capacity rose in 2008 and the first part of 2009 as the capital expansion programs were completed, and completed just in time for the implosion in chip sales. By January 2009, chip sales were 33 percent below the year earlier level.
A little too late, and a little too little, in 2009 only three companies announced capital spending budgets greater than one billion dollars. Meanwhile, the industry has fashioned a recovery of sorts, as it always fashions its recovery: shutting production lines, reducing capacity, laying-off production workers. In particular, almost all the older 200mm wafer lines have been closed, allowing the industry to register a capacity utilization rate for the first quarter 2010 of 93 percent versus 2009’s first quarter rate of 57 percent.
Numbers are one thing, but capitalism is about money, real—more or less—money. So, as a money professional said of the semiconductor industry: “This is a horrible, terrible business that no one should be in, the way it’s organized currently…You get some incremental profits for a little while, then everybody moves in and there’s oversupply again."3
The “horrible business” is not, of course, the business of semiconductor fabrication. It is the business of capital accumulation, where the very machinery of accumulation becomes the obstacle to its own valorisation. Our capitalist, unloved and well-known, is at war, now more than less, with the usefulness of his, or her, own property in the means of production. The “solutions” for recovery are reproductions of the fundamental conflict. To offset the delayed return on the accumulated fixed assets, the capitalism will demand, and sooner rather than later, lengthening of the working day in order to garner absolute surplus value; physical destruction of accumulated assets; reduction in wages and consumption not because wages are significant factors in the costs of production—they are not, in the semiconductor industry production worker wages amount to 1 or 2 percent of the total costs of production—but because reducing wages provides additional surplus value. All this and more amounts again to a reproduction of the fundamental conflict between labor organized as wage-labor, and the means of production organized as capital, a conflict to which capitalism has no, and seeks no solution. Rather it is in liquidation, destruction, deprivation, immiseration of capital—fixed, circulating, constant, and variable— that our capitalist places all of his, or her, hopes for the future.

• 1 Returns for Domestic Nonfinancial Business,” Andrew W. Hodge and Robert Corea.
• 2 Shameless self-advertisement: for a highly condensed but more detailed discussion of the anti-economics of semiconductor fabrication see Reprint on Reproduction.
• 3Avi Cohen, managing partner, Avian Securities, as quoted in the New York Times, July 5, 2009, “Despite Turmoil in Chip Industry, Signs of Hope for Micron Technology.