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Greetings all, I am a tenant unionist in Omaha, NE and an independent student of Marxist political economy. I read Measuring the Wealth of Nations last year, and plan on attempting Capitalism later this year after I've done some preparatory work. A group of Marxists within the local tenants union we founded, Omaha Tenants United, are undertaking the task of attempting to put together a formal class analysis of the Omaha metro area. My question is: since there do not appear to be subnational input-output tables available, I was wondering what some decent proxies might be for attempting to estimate the OCC, RoP, and rate of surplus value of Omaha. One idea that I had would be simply taking the national US IO tables to calculate the average OCC for each industry using the method described in Measuring the Wealth of Nations, and then scaling these down and weighting them based on the size of the Omaha economy and the relative percent that each industry makes up here, if that make sense. I understand this would be imprecise, but do you think this would at least provide a somewhat accurate approximation? Or would you recommend an alternative method/data source to do this? Would love to hear any thoughts and ideas. We are hopeful that this class analysis will generate some new empirical work that has not been done here before that will be valuable for local organizers, and provide a blueprint for those elsewhere to follow. Thanks!

Maybe a stupd question: in the appendix to 1977's "Marx's Theory of Value the Transformation Problem", what is the significance of the plus symbol in a circle?

In the last chapter of Capitalism, Shaikh highlights a few areas for further research which real economic analysis can address, including development and underdevelopment, and rising inequality. Within that chapter, the subsection "Rising inequality and the class distribution of income" provides an equation for before-tax income inequality. Taking that as a starting point, I attempted to extend the analysis to evaluate after-tax income inequality and also wealth inequality (including deriving equations for after-tax income and wealth Gini indices and comparing against empirical data). This is of course a large topic which calls for further refinement and elaboration and so I am sharing my work here (see pdf; The Economic Basis of Social Polarization is also freely available on Google Books). Here is a brief description of the work: The economic basis of social polarization is empirically evaluated in the US (from the post-World War II boom through neoliberalism) and comparisons are made with the rest of the G7 (under neoliberalism). Income inequality is explained in terms of three factors: the profit share of net value added, tax redistribution, and the proportion of profit distributed to households. Wealth inequality is explained in terms of two factors: the proportions of assets and liabilities comprising net wealth and the share of financial assets held by the ruling class. The division of net value added between wages and profit is further evaluated and explained in terms of fundamental factors shaping capitalist development: profitability, capital accumulation, capital intensity, and the wage rate.