Capitalism’s Growth Imperative

A capitalist firm operating in a competitive market is subject to a growth imperative, because uncertainty about the profit rate under a no-growth policy makes the firm’s prospects highly unattractive in finite time and bankruptcy practically certain in the long run. A no-growth policy determines consumption and investment so that they and capital would remain constant over time if the latter's expected return were realized with certainty. Simulation is used to arrive at the probability of bankruptcy by the end of t periods and the expected values of capital and money, for relevant combinations of time and uncertainty under successively more realistic models of a no-growth firm in a competitive market. The sensitivity of the results to variation in the parameters in each of the models is evaluated. Finally, we consider what firms might actually do to achieve the benefits of growth and more attractive prospects of survival. _________________ * The authors are respectively Professor of Finance, Rotman School of Management, and Professor of Statistics, both at University of Toronto. Their email addresses are: [email protected], and [email protected]. 1 CAPITALISM’S GROWTH IMPERATIVE ABSTRACT A capitalist firm operating in a competitive market is subject to a growth imperative, because uncertainty about the profit rate under a no-growth policy makes the firm’s prospects highly unattractive in finite time and bankruptcy practically certain in the long run. A no-growth policy determines consumption and investment so that they and capital would remain constant over time if the latter's expected return were realized with certainty. Simulation is used to arrive at the probability of bankruptcy by the end of t periods and the expected values of capital and money, for relevant combinations of time and uncertainty under successively more realistic models of a no-growth firm in a competitive market. The sensitivity of the results to variation in the parameters in each of the models is evaluated. Finally, we consider what firms might actually do to achieve the benefits of growth and more attractive prospects of survival. INTRODUCTION The primary purpose of this paper is to establish that a capitalist enterprise operating in a competitive environment, be it a proprietorship or a corporation, is subject to a growth imperative. By a growth imperative, we mean that the enterprise requires the expectation of a positive growth rate, probably one that is well above the physically feasible rate of growth for an actual closed competitive capitalist system. A positive and probably high mean rate of growth is necessitated by the facts that the actual profit rate is uncertain, and its realization varies over a very wide range. This high variability makes an enterprise with a zero or negative mean expected value for its growth rate face a future in which bankruptcy is practically certain in the long run, and has an intolerably high probability in the short run, while providing little or no compensating benefits by way of growth in income or wealth until bankruptcy takes place. In fact, income and wealth can be expected to fall over time. By a competitive capitalist enterprise, we mean one in which the enterprise buys and sells in markets in which government or other regulatory authority plays no role in determining the prices and quantities for what it buys and 2 sells. The reliance on competitive markets for specialization and exchange and for the determination of each capitalist’s profit are the source of the high variability in the profit rate and the necessity of a positive and probably high mean expected rate of growth. It is widely if not universally accepted that growth is desirable. Some environmentalists fear that growth per se is destroying our physical environment. Representatives of third world countries have charged that policies which generate growth in the industrial countries are at the expense of their people, and some development economists express the fear that this may be true. However, with few exceptions, economists in developed capitalist countries take for granted that growth is desirable and their concern is with policies that achieve growth. Keynes gave rise to a macroeconomic theory under which investment is not only desirable for growth in the long run, but necessary to avoid stagnation and unemployment in the short run. We make the stronger claim here that growth is not merely desirable: it is necessary for tolerable prospects for future survival for each capitalist and perhaps for the system as a whole. To our knowledge, only some business leaders make the same claim on the micro level. But they argue that innovations in technology, marketing, etc. by their competitors force them to participate in the quest for competitive advantage. To our knowledge, no theory of a capitalist firm or individual has been advanced under which a policy intended to maintain it at a stationary level is certain or even highly likely to lead to its collapse in the long run and offer highly unattractive prospects in the short run. Neoclassical theory, mainstream economic theory, offers a radically different view of a capitalist firm. Nothing is easier for a firm than remaining in a stationary state, and for a real person, growth is a matter of taste. It is no more than preference between present and future consumption. 3 We say it is capitalism that is subject to a growth imperative, because the same is not true of a pure socialist system. Regardless of what other problems are faced by a socialist system, its own operation does not subject it to a growth imperative. It will be seen that notwithstanding a common technology of production, the difference between how it is administered in the two systems give rise to a growth imperative in one and its absence in the other. The propositions that a pure socialist system offers security and stagnation, while a pure (competitive) capitalist system offers insecurity and growth have been recognized, but they have not been investigated rigorously. What we will do here is to explain rigorously how a capitalist system generates insecurity and growth, and then consider what capitalists do to deal with the insecurity. The next section presents a simple model of a capitalist firm and establishes what happens to its probability of survival and its wealth over time under a no-growth policy, both conditional on its survival and without that condition. We find that it is certain to go bankrupt in the long run, and simulation of the model reveals that the firm does poorly in finite time regardless of the profitability and other relevant variables. Section II reviews the treatment of growth, uncertainty and bankruptcy in the economics literature. Prior to Keynes, the problem of uncertainty about the future was resolved by assuming that the uncertain future value of a variable could be represented by its mean. Keynes’s dissatisfaction with this solution to the investment problem motivated a postwar literature on investment under uncertainty and risk aversion. The mainstream theoretical literature established that the utopian properties of a perfectly competitive capitalist system are preserved in the face of uncertainty and risk aversion. This was accomplished and the feasibility of a stationary state was maintained, we shall see, by ignoring or trivializing the problem of bankruptcy. Section III introduces a number of refinements in the model that make it more realistic. 4 Bankruptcy in the long run is not shown to be certain in every case, but its probability is very high for combinations of uncertainty and time that are large. Finally, Section IV establishes that investment and expenditure policies to achieve growth realize that objective, but they do not increase the probability of survival. Far more is needed. One of the main reasons for interest in microeconomic models of a firm is their use as a foundation for macro models of a capitalist system. The hope is that the macro model will illuminate the short-term fluctuations and long-term development of actual capitalist systems. We have that hope for the models of a capitalist firm presented here. More needs to be done, however, before moving to the macro level with these models. What we can and will do, in the section on growth and in the conclusion, is raise questions about the performance of actual capitalist systems that are suggested by our model. I. A SIMPLE MODEL OF CAPITAL This section will present a model of a capitalist, i.e., a proprietor or a corporation, that is simple, powerful, and, we believe, useful for understanding their behavior on the micro level and the system’s macro behavior. The model incorporates real and nominal capital, uncertainty about the profit rate on capital, consumption, investment in both forms of capital, and bankruptcy, all in a plausible manner. There are also important omissions, as we shall see, among them labor, government and monetary policy.