IS CAPITALISM TOO PRODUCTIVE

Lionel Jospin recently took power in France with a promise to reduce t he work-week from 39 to 35 hours. Why? Because of the latest popular e conomic fallacy: the theory of global glut, or the belief that there i s too much output and not enough work to go around in today's hypereff icient economy. But productive capacity in the advanced nations is not growing much faster than it was during the last two decades, and more slowly than in the 1950s and 1960s. People will always find new wants , and the newly industrializing countries are consuming even more than they produce. As Marx could have told you, capitalism can go on accum ulating capital-and producing more goods and services-forever.