The Spectre (was: Re: Liberalism and its discontents)
D. Anton Sherwood
>
>example, if you want five pounds of potatoes, the system
>charges you relative to how much trouble people in general
>think it's going to be to grow, dig up, transport, and sell
>the potatoes. If potatoes started falling from the sky,
>then the price of potatoes would fall to zero, because
>there would no longer be any *labor connected with the
>prospect of future potatoes.
>
>However, potatoes seldom fall from the sky, and their value
>remains connected with the *labor.
That's cost, not value. In a competitive market prices tend
to approach costs (while monopoly makes price tend toward value),
so it's easy to see where the confusion arises.
--
Banding Apart to Take Uncontrol!
Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* DAS...@netcom.com
"Don't forget, your mind only *simulates* logic." --Glen C. Perkins
Gordon Fitch
g...@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
| >example, if you want five pounds of potatoes, the system
| >charges you relative to how much trouble people in general
| >think it's going to be to grow, dig up, transport, and sell
| >the potatoes. If potatoes started falling from the sky,
| >then the price of potatoes would fall to zero, because
| >there would no longer be any *labor connected with the
| >prospect of future potatoes.
| >
| >However, potatoes seldom fall from the sky, and their value
| >remains connected with the *labor.
D. Anton Sherwood <das...@netcom.com> wrote:
| That's cost, not value. In a competitive market prices tend
| to approach costs (while monopoly makes price tend toward value),
| so it's easy to see where the confusion arises.
There's a big vocabulary problem in discussing this
question. To me, "cost" and "price" are virtually
the same thing, except "cost" is more limited in
application. And "price" (in a market) is the result
of a comparison of exchange values. So then I ask,
"How does this (exchange) value happen to be attached
to objects?" and answer myself "Through association
of its class with *labor, that is, suffering." At
this point, my audience groans, and demands its money
back, which I cheerfully refund. I haven't suffered.
By the way, if in a competitive market prices always
tend to fall toward costs, how come we haven't had
a socialist revolution led by the immiserated pro-
letariat?
--
)*( Gordon Fitch )*( g...@panix.com )*(
Rick Beckham
when more suffering exists, i.e. more labor needed for living standard
wages, and more labor is needed during inflation for living standard
wages but prices rise? I believe in both situations labor has little
to do with creating value, and people revert back to valuing
necessities over wants.
Gordon Fitch
| >"How does this (exchange) value happen to be attached
| >to objects?" and answer myself "Through association
| >of its class with *labor, that is, suffering." At
| >this point, my audience groans, and demands its money
| >back, which I cheerfully refund. I haven't suffered.
Rick Beckham <rbec...@bnr.ca> wrote:
| If this is true, then why do prices tend to fall during depressions,
| when more suffering exists, i.e. more labor needed for living standard
| wages, and more labor is needed during inflation for living standard
| wages but prices rise? I believe in both situations labor has little
| to do with creating value, and people revert back to valuing
| necessities over wants.
The suffering has to remain under the control of the
sufferer, or at least she has to get something for it;
this doesn't happen during a depression. However, this
criticism may be productive; I'm going to think about
it, and I thank you for it.
D. Anton Sherwood
g...@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>It keeps coming back....
No joke!
>. So then I ask,
>"How does this (exchange) value happen to be attached
>to objects?" and answer myself "Through association
>of its class with *labor, that is, suffering." At
>this point, my audience groans, and demands its money
>back, which I cheerfully refund. I haven't suffered.
>
>By the way, if in a competitive market prices always
>tend to fall toward costs, how come we haven't had
>a socialist revolution led by the immiserated pro-
>letariat?
Sorry, you've lost me.
--
"This is a vat of viscous red fluid."
Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* DAS...@netcom.com
"Only dangerous psychotics celebrate real blood."
Gordon Fitch
| >. So then I ask,
| >"How does this (exchange) value happen to be attached
| >to objects?" and answer myself "Through association
| >of its class with *labor, that is, suffering." At
| >this point, my audience groans, and demands its money
| >back, which I cheerfully refund. I haven't suffered.
| >
| >By the way, if in a competitive market prices always
| >tend to fall toward costs, how come we haven't had
| >a socialist revolution led by the immiserated pro-
| >letariat?
D. Anton Sherwood <das...@netcom.com> wrote:
| Sorry, you've lost me.
As to the first paragraph, I lost everybody, so I stopped
developing the theory here. The second paragraph is an
elementary part of Marx's theory that capitalism would tend
inexorably toward socialist revolution. The cost of
producing labor is the minimum sustenance of the laborer.
Labor is a competitive market. The capitalist is driven to
pay the worker as little as possible. At the same time, her
capital (along with all the other capitalists' capital) is
becoming more plentiful, therefore cheaper, therefore
harder to rent out at a good return; therefore it's harder
to make a profit. The capitalist is driven to cut costs
everywhere, and cuts wages below the level of sustenance for
the workers. The workers are driven to revolt. Since they
have read the _Communist_Manifesto_, _Value,_Price,_and_
_Profit_ and other improving literature, they institute a
socialist system.
Real students of Marx may want to correct me on the above,
but I think I've got it about right. And if experience is
any guide, about half a dozen people will also find it
necessary to wrestle Marx to the mat yet again, lest any
unsophisticated person be gulled into thinking he was
anything but wrong, wrong, wrong.
Roger Bryner
SO LETS START THERE.
I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT THE IDEA OF GEDANKEN EXPERIMENTS WAS GOOD
LETS DEFINE A SYSTEM, WHICH WE CAN APPLY THE IDEAS TOO.
>question. To me, "cost" and "price" are virtually
>the same thing, except "cost" is more limited in
>application. And "price" (in a market) is the result
>of a comparison of exchange values. So then I ask,
>"How does this (exchange) value happen to be attached
>to objects?" and answer myself "Through association
>of its class with *labor, that is, suffering." At
>this point, my audience groans, and demands its money
>back, which I cheerfully refund. I haven't suffered.
But you labored to tell them about the theory?
Why is it that you haven't suffered.
Perhaps it is because your audience does not value your
idea at it's cost, and therfore your price is too great.
What is the cost, price, and labor associated with the
actions in front of the audience?
Roger, Mad Dog, Bryner.
Gordon Fitch
| >There's a big vocabulary problem in discussing this
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
bry...@chemistry.utah.edu (Roger Bryner) writes:
| SO LETS START THERE.
| I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT THE IDEA OF GEDANKEN EXPERIMENTS WAS GOOD
| LETS DEFINE A SYSTEM, WHICH WE CAN APPLY THE IDEAS TOO.
In talk.politics.theory-sprach, we have "desert island"
and "lifeboat" scenarios. However, people who practice
these sorts of Gedanken experiments mysteriously
disappear on All-Hallows' Eve, and are never heard from
again, so I don't recommend it, except to certain
people.
| >question. To me, "cost" and "price" are virtually
| >the same thing, except "cost" is more limited in
| >application. And "price" (in a market) is the result
| >of a comparison of exchange values. So then I ask,
| >"How does this (exchange) value happen to be attached
| >to objects?" and answer myself "Through association
| >of its class with *labor, that is, suffering." At
| >this point, my audience groans, and demands its money
| >back, which I cheerfully refund. I haven't suffered.
|
| But you labored to tell them about the theory?
No, it's play.
| Why is it that you haven't suffered.
Because I enjoyed doing it for itself. Vernacular
production.
| Perhaps it is because your audience does not value your
| idea at it's cost, and therfore your price is too great.
They value it precisely at its price.
| What is the cost, price, and labor associated with the
| actions in front of the audience?
"I own nothing; I owe much. The rest I leave to
the poor."
Steve Gustafson
Gordon Fitch quoth:
GF>Real students of Marx may want to correct me on the above,
>but I think I've got it about right. And if experience is
>any guide, about half a dozen people will also find it
>necessary to wrestle Marx to the mat yet again, lest any
>unsophisticated person be gulled into thinking he was
>anything but wrong, wrong, wrong.
As a sometime student of Marx, I think it's reasonable for a -summary-.
In hopes of trying to seem original by putting forth a criticism that
isn't that often heard, both Marx and his classical capitalist critics
are wrong. Both laboured under the wrong assumption that new wealth
-can- be created. This is the underlying assumption behind Marx's
belief that the capitalist would face an ever-declining return on his
ever-increasing store of capital; and an article of faith among
believers in eternal progress through free markets.
In fact, if not impossible, it's damned hard to create new wealth. The
world is only so large, and it can only support so much human activity.
Real wealth is not money; if so hyperinflation could turn us all into
overnight billionaires. It is not -merely- the amount of valuable or
useful goods you can turn out; in gold boom towns large quantities of
gold are needed to exchange for a pair of boots; increasing gold
production per se has not made anyone richer. Nor is it defined by
labour per se, for the same reason.
It is instead the space on the globe you can appropriate to yourself and
the command of tangible objects, from soybeans to microchips to cocaine,
that you can hoard or make use of. At any given moment this amount of
-real- wealth is fixed and limited, no matter how you decide to count
it. Whatever real wealth you gain, has been taken from somebody else.
Supply and demand cannot bring forth more wealth; only divert resources
and human effort from one thing to another.
An increase in "wealth" only occurs when new ideas place higher values
on old resources; and the pace of -that- happening, while non-zero, has
not kept pace with the increase of the earth's population. Indeed,
technology has on the one hand redefined the minimum subsistence level
to include things undreamt of in Marx's day, and at the same time made
the unequal distribution of capital resources more pronounced. Instead
of leading to socialist revolution, these things have bound the workers
to the economic system with ever stouter chains.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Asperius nihil est humili cum surgit in altum.
Robert Vienneau
>Gordon Fitch quoth:
>
>GF>Real students of Marx may want to correct me on the above,
>>but I think I've got it about right. And if experience is
>>any guide, about half a dozen people will also find it
>>necessary to wrestle Marx to the mat yet again, lest any
>>unsophisticated person be gulled into thinking he was
>>anything but wrong, wrong, wrong.
>
>As a sometime student of Marx, I think it's reasonable for a -summary-.
Are you sure that Gordon is not a follower of a combination of
epigones of Ricardo, who just did not understand what he was about,
and French post-structuralist philosophers, who use atrocious jargon
such that nobody can understand what they are about?
Robert Vienneau
--
The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Campus Office for Information
Technology, or the Experimental Bulletin Board Service.
internet: laUNChpad.unc.edu or 152.2.22.80
Gordon Fitch
| >GF>Real students of Marx may want to correct me on the above,
| >>but I think I've got it about right. And if experience is
| >>any guide, about half a dozen people will also find it
| >>necessary to wrestle Marx to the mat yet again, lest any
| >>unsophisticated person be gulled into thinking he was
| >>anything but wrong, wrong, wrong.
Steve Gustafson writes:
| >As a sometime student of Marx, I think it's reasonable for a -summary-.
Robert Vienneau <Robert....@launchpad.unc.edu> wrote:
| Are you sure that Gordon is not a follower of a combination of
| epigones of Ricardo, who just did not understand what he was about,
| and French post-structuralist philosophers, who use atrocious jargon
| such that nobody can understand what they are about?
No. I'd be so busy running back and forth between the
epigones and the _jargonneurs_atroces_ that I'd have no
time to post pedestrian little summaries of Marx.
c...@ardi.com
>Gordon Fitch quoth:
...
>No. I'd be so busy running back and forth between the
>epigones and the _jargonneurs_atroces_ that I'd have no
>time to post pedestrian little summaries of Marx.
Hey Gordon!
Isn't "pedestrian" a Republican word? And "quoth"? Shouldn't
you get off your little bourgeois behind and be down at the
sawmill or sumthin?
--Cliff
c...@ardi.com
Chris Auld
>It is instead the space on the globe you can appropriate to yourself and
>the command of tangible objects, from soybeans to microchips to cocaine,
>that you can hoard or make use of. At any given moment this amount of
>-real- wealth is fixed and limited, no matter how you decide to count
>it. Whatever real wealth you gain, has been taken from somebody else.
>Supply and demand cannot bring forth more wealth; only divert resources
>and human effort from one thing to another.
This is completely false, except under a rather bizarre defintion of
`wealth.' If we literally accept your definition -- that wealth is
measured solely by the amount of matter and physical space one is in
command of -- then, since land and matter are fixed, wealth cannot
increase. But this is a silly definition, surely we need to define
wealth in terms of how much people _want_ the objects in question.
Once this is allowed, it is clear that wealth is constantly being
created and destroyed, and that wealth has been accumulating over time.
If I take a piece of paper and draw a picture on it that you like,
wealth is created. If that picture is accidentally burned up, wealth
is destroyed. If every day I paint a new picture which other people
are willing to trade for, wealth increases over time.
Even if the number of objects is fixed, if we allow wealth to vary
with how much people like the objects they have, one person's gain
need not imply another's loss. Suppose there are only two people
in existence, each with one immutable object. If these people
agree to trade objects, both gain, for if at least one thought he
would lose, he would not have agreed to exchange.
The notion that wealth is fixed, and hence one person's gain must
be another's loss, is false both in premise and logic.
--
Chris Auld
Department of Economics
Queen's University at Kingston
au...@econ01.econ.queensu.ca
Robert Vienneau
>| >GF>Real students of Marx may want to correct me on the above,
>Steve Gustafson writes:
>| >As a sometime student of Marx, I think it's reasonable for a -summary-.
>
>Robert Vienneau <Robert....@launchpad.unc.edu> wrote:
>| Are you sure that Gordon is not a follower of a combination of
>| epigones of Ricardo, who just did not understand what he was about,
>| and French post-structuralist philosophers, who use atrocious jargon
>| such that nobody can understand what they are about?
>
>No. I'd be so busy running back and forth between the
>epigones and the _jargonneurs_atroces_ that I'd have no
>time to post pedestrian little summaries of Marx.
Gordon seems to be a fellow who can take some jesting or jousting.
I have not actually read the economists I am about to discuss, only
quite a bit about them.
The followers of Ricardo I had in mind were James Mill and John Ramsay
McCulloch. Consider the case of wine left in a cellar for a year. As
it ages, its value increases. Mill just knew the labor theory of value
was true, so he said this case could be analyzed as if labor had been
expended on the wine during the year. J. R. McCulloch has a
reputation for going through even more incredible contortions and
redefinitions of labor to ensure the validity of the labor theory of
value.
Then there's Nassau Senior, who reinterpreted labor in a psychological
sense. Its the discomfort and dislike of labor that count. Once the
supply of labor comes to depend on these subjective considerations,
its easy to account for profit/interest along the same lines. Giving
up the immediate gratification of consumption now is a sacrifice, a
disutility that the supplier of capital undergoes. The prospect of a
greater reward in the future, hence interest, is what induces the
unpleasantness of savings. The value of a good must cover all
the toil and trouble of those who supply the factors which are needed
to produce it. With Senior we are half-way to Marshall's real costs.
Does any of the above sound familiar? Next we should get Gordon to read
some out-of-date physics/mechanics and reinterpret the notation in a
particular incompetent manner, with perfectly arbitrary conservation
laws. Then he will invent Neoclassical economics. As the prophet said,
"There is nothing new under the sun. All is vanity of vanities."
Robert Vienneau
(who wrote an exceedingly brilliant summary of Marx a few weeks ago.
Unfortunately, his hard disk crashed before he could post it, so you'll
just have to take his word for it.)
Gordon Fitch
| ...
| >No. I'd be so busy running back and forth between the
| >epigones and the _jargonneurs_atroces_ that I'd have no
| >time to post pedestrian little summaries of Marx.
c...@ardi.com writes:
| Hey Gordon!
| Isn't "pedestrian" a Republican word? And "quoth"? Shouldn't
| you get off your little bourgeois behind and be down at the
| sawmill or sumthin?
I don't mind being bourgeois. And I used French up there,
so I can't possibly be a Republican. "Quoth" is from Steve
Gustafson, who has a funny news reader, and isn't Republican
either. I've never heard a Republican say "quoth."
Gordon Fitch
| >It is instead the space on the globe you can appropriate to yourself and
| >the command of tangible objects, from soybeans to microchips to cocaine,
| >that you can hoard or make use of. At any given moment this amount of
| >-real- wealth is fixed and limited, no matter how you decide to count
| >it. Whatever real wealth you gain, has been taken from somebody else.
| >Supply and demand cannot bring forth more wealth; only divert resources
| >and human effort from one thing to another.
au...@qed.uucp (Chris Auld) writes:
| This is completely false, except under a rather bizarre defintion of
| `wealth.' If we literally accept your definition -- that wealth is
| measured solely by the amount of matter and physical space one is in
| command of -- then, since land and matter are fixed, wealth cannot
| increase. But this is a silly definition, surely we need to define
| wealth in terms of how much people _want_ the objects in question.
| Once this is allowed, it is clear that wealth is constantly being
| created and destroyed, and that wealth has been accumulating over time.
|
| If I take a piece of paper and draw a picture on it that you like,
| wealth is created. ...
I think the term "wealth" is ambiguous here. On the one
hand, it seems to mean "objects having value" and as such
its value lies with the evaluator, in the manner you describe.
On the other hand, we often use wealth to mean material which
has been _informed_ by human activity (such as a lump of
metal which is changed into a machine tool) which is not only
valued but which appears to be materially involved in
creating further wealth of its kind. The latter form of
wealth is not as dependent on emotion as the first, or at
least it appears not to be. A very large amount of informa-
tion can be put into a finite piece of matter -- we can make
ever more sophisticated machine tools -- but there might be
an upper limit to that process.
Roger Bryner
You mean that one kind is mater, or finite resources, like sunlight or
energy and the other is information content, or machening.
>least it appears not to be. A very large amount of informa-
>tion can be put into a finite piece of matter -- we can make
>ever more sophisticated machine tools -- but there might be
>an upper limit to that process.
It is so huge as to be infinite. Look to microchips for an example.
Another example of informing is the growth of grain from minerals, land,
sunlight, and water.
microchips require silicon and some very _informed_ tools, generations
of them, in fact. The information content of these is great.
Cocane requires some chemical precursors, or a plant source, which has
_information_content_ added to it by the process of purification. In
this process, polution and byproducts are created. This is true in all
the other processes, also. They are all governed by the laws of
thermodynamics, which can form a basis for much of a tax structure based
upon this principle.
finite=public.
infinite or indefinite=private.
Roger Bryner.
****************************************************************
"Education... engrafts a new man of the native stock, and improves
what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue
and social worth. And it cannot be that each generation succeeding
to the knowledge acquired by all those who preceded it, adding to
it their own acquisitions and discoveries, and handing the mass
down for successive and constant accumulation, must advance the
knowledge and well-being of mankind, not infinitely, as some have
^^^^^^^^^^
said, but indefinitely, and to a term which no one can fix or
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
foresee."
---Thomas Jefferson, 1818.
Roger Bryner
When you add a polutent to air, you are changing the entropy of the whole
atmosphere. If you accept the fact that the air we breathe is public
property, you must accept that your actions in poluting it are agressive
towards the human race as a whole. At the same time, without our ablility
to polute it with co2, we could not even breathe. Thus, it is an almost
infinite NEGATIVE resource,(it= polution).
This is the basis of my arguments about property and polution tax. I hope
this can lead to a choherent tax code.
Roger Bryner.
************************************************************************
The first law says you can never win, only break even.
The second law says you can only break even at absolute zero.
The third law says you can never reach absolute zero.
Gordon Fitch
| >I think the term "wealth" is ambiguous here. On the one
| >hand, it seems to mean "objects having value" and as such
| >its value lies with the evaluator, in the manner you describe.
| >On the other hand, we often use wealth to mean material which
| >has been _informed_ by human activity (such as a lump of
| >metal which is changed into a machine tool) which is not only
| >valued but which appears to be materially involved in
| >creating further wealth of its kind. The latter form of
Roger Bryner <bry...@chemistry.utah.edu> wrote:
| You mean that one kind is mater, or finite resources, like sunlight or
| energy and the other is information content, or machening.
No. One is cognitive and the other affective. I'm
accepting the Kantian perspective, that there can be
cognition independent of emotion. The value that the
evaluator creates is emotional. However, we can also
see that, apparently independent of emotion, there is
a kind of informing of matter we can call "wealth" or
"capital" which _mechanistically_ enables, perhaps
provides, replication or production of itself.
I'm not sure this goes anywhere; it's another angle
on the question of labor and value.
[ amount of information which can be embedded in matter ]
Roger Bryner:
| It is so huge as to be infinite. Look to microchips for an example.
| Another example of informing is the growth of grain from minerals, land,
| sunlight, and water.
Our current understanding of the universe is that a
finite amount of matter can contain only a finite
amount of information, because the transmission and
storage of information requires energy, and a finite
amount of matter cannot contain an infinite amount of
energy. However, I don't know if this limitation has
any practical significance. It might.
Roger Bryner
/g...@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
/| >I think the term "wealth" is ambiguous here. On the one
/| >hand, it seems to mean "objects having value" and as such
/| >its value lies with the evaluator, in the manner you describe.
/| >On the other hand, we often use wealth to mean material which
/| >has been _informed_ by human activity (such as a lump of
/| >metal which is changed into a machine tool) which is not only
/| >valued but which appears to be materially involved in
/| >creating further wealth of its kind. The latter form of
/| >wealth is not as dependent on emotion as the first....
Neither is dependent at all.
/Roger Bryner <bry...@chemistry.utah.edu> wrote:
/| You mean that one kind is mater, or finite resources, like sunlight or
/| energy and the other is information content, or machening.
/
/No. One is cognitive and the other affective. I'm
/accepting the Kantian perspective, that there can be
/cognition independent of emotion. The value that the
/evaluator creates is emotional. However, we can also
/see that, apparently independent of emotion, there is
/a kind of informing of matter we can call "wealth" or
/"capital" which _mechanistically_ enables, perhaps
/provides, replication or production of itself.
It all starts with human will. This is sufficient for everything.
Emotion, or the state of mind of the laborer, is totaly pointless.
It is what they do that matters.
/I'm not sure this goes anywhere; it's another angle
/on the question of labor and value.
/
/[ amount of information which can be embedded in matter ]
/
/Roger Bryner:
/| It is so huge as to be infinite. Look to microchips for an example.
/| Another example of informing is the growth of grain from minerals, land,
/| sunlight, and water.
/
/Our current understanding of the universe is that a
/finite amount of matter can contain only a finite
/amount of information, because the transmission and
/storage of information requires energy, and a finite
/amount of matter cannot contain an infinite amount of
/energy. However, I don't know if this limitation has
/any practical significance. It might.
Your use of the word energy is not in line with what I was thinking.
due to entropy, change of mater requires energy. The limit is the amount
of energy present, if anything. The ammount of mater is not realy a limit.
This IS our current understanding of the universe. I realy don't recognise
yours.
Roger Bryner.
Steve Gustafson
Cliff (c...@ardi.com) quoth:
CT>Hey Gordon!
>Isn't "pedestrian" a Republican word? And "quoth"? Shouldn't
>you get off your little bourgeois behind and be down at the
>sawmill or sumthin?
'Quoth' is from one of mine. Gordon's not allowed at the sawmill
anymore, once they found those rare weasels in the forest. It's -tough-
to be an environmentally correct proletarian.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Dixit Dominus: stercus evenit.
Steve Gustafson
Chris Auld, Stefano Gustafson citato, sic ait:
SG>(Wealth) is instead the space on the globe you can appropriate to
>yourself and the command of tangible objects, from soybeans to
>microchips to cocaine, that you can hoard or make use of. At any
>given moment this amount of -real- wealth is fixed and limited, no
>matter how you decide to count it. Whatever real wealth you gain,
>has been taken from somebody else. Supply and demand cannot bring
>forth more wealth; only divert resources and human effort from one
>thing to another.
CA>This is completely false, except under a rather bizarre defintion of
>`wealth.' If we literally accept your definition -- that wealth is
>measured solely by the amount of matter and physical space one is in
>command of -- then, since land and matter are fixed, wealth cannot
>increase. But this is a silly definition, surely we need to define
>wealth in terms of how much people _want_ the objects in question.
CA>If I take a piece of paper and draw a picture on it that you like,
>wealth is created. If that picture is accidentally burned up, wealth
>is destroyed. If every day I paint a new picture which other people
>are willing to trade for, wealth increases over time.
This introduces a subjective quality into the definition that I have
striven to avoid. The way I would see it, the esteem in which other
people hold your pictures does not in itself make them more
intrinsically desirable or valuable. Instead, it serves to -divert-
them, perhaps temporarily, from being used for other purposes --- to be
erased and used as a notepad, for instance, or for being used as
kindling to light a fire.
I would not choose to use this morning's newspaper to light a fire with.
I would have no qualms about using last week's. This difference creates
nothing tangible; therefore, despite accounting for a difference between
the use I am willing to make of the two newspapers, it creates no
-wealth-. Come next week, the same newspaper will again become a
candidate for the fireplace. I may derive more temporary satisfaction
from reading a current newspaper than a week old one; but that vanishes
once I have read it; the paper itself is the same. I am no wealthier
for owning an unread newspaper than a read one.
If in the machinations of human folly, people temporarily are willing to
exchange large quantities of gold for tulip bulbs, and come the next
week are no longer willing to do so, the bulbs themselves have not
changed. From one moment to the next they became no more or less useful
in and of themselves; and she who owns one has an equal chance of making
it grow a flower, whether she paid a thousand dollars or a dime. All
that changed was the resources and effort people were willing to divert
in order to possess one. "Wealth" that is contingent only on the
fluctuation of people's esteem is often made out of nothing but air.
My definition aims specifically at avoiding this illusory quality. It
may not do so perfectly, but any definition that does not strikes me as
inadequate. Yours seems unable to exclude it. By your definition, a
fellow who owned a tulip bulb during the week that people were paying
thousands for them was a rich man, even if he was not prudent or
informed enough to sell while the market was hot. Come the next week,
the fortune whose very existence he may have been unaware of came to
ruin. I think that in reality he was no richer and no poorer despite
these unknown events.
Of course, had he sold when the market was inflated, he would have gold
for which others would divert their resources and efforts. All the
other fellow would have had was a lousy tulip bulb, which still does no
more than grow a flower despite the handsome price the bilked customer
paid. The seller would have increased his claim on the limited
resources of the world, at someone else's expense. He has a pile of
gold, which has retained most of its esteem in others' eyes, and is just
as useful as it always was. The buyer has a plant that has lost most of
its esteem in others' eyes, and which again is as useful as it always
was. The seller's real gain is the buyer's real loss.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Vivre? Les serviteurs feront cela pour nous.
Chris Auld
>This introduces a subjective quality into the definition that I have
>striven to avoid. The way I would see it, the esteem in which other
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>people hold your pictures does not in itself make them more
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>intrinsically desirable or valuable. Instead, it serves to -divert-
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>them, perhaps temporarily, from being used for other purposes --- to be
>erased and used as a notepad, for instance, or for being used as
>kindling to light a fire.
There is no value to an object aside from the subjective value people
place upon. Take a look at the underlined sentence, in short form,
``The value people place on your picture does not make it more desirable.''
In what way can an object be desirable if people place no value (esteem)
upon it? Surely, your argument leads to some ridiculous conclusions --
if only the material and not their current form matter, we are just
as wealthy with rotten food as with fresh food and with burned paintings
as with intact paintings. If only matter and not the desirability of its
form matters, is wealth not fixed at some constant level for all time? How
can it possibly change?
>Come next week, the same newspaper will again become a
>candidate for the fireplace. I may derive more temporary satisfaction
>from reading a current newspaper than a week old one; but that vanishes
>once I have read it; the paper itself is the same. I am no wealthier
>for owning an unread newspaper than a read one.
That's because the exchange value of the newspaper is the same whether
you've read it or not. You are more wealthy if you have today's
newspaper rather than last week's, because other people value that
newspaper more.
>If in the machinations of human folly, people temporarily are willing to
>exchange large quantities of gold for tulip bulbs, and come the next
>week are no longer willing to do so, the bulbs themselves have not
>changed. From one moment to the next they became no more or less useful
>in and of themselves; and she who owns one has an equal chance of making
>it grow a flower, whether she paid a thousand dollars or a dime. All
>that changed was the resources and effort people were willing to divert
>in order to possess one. "Wealth" that is contingent only on the
>fluctuation of people's esteem is often made out of nothing but air.
Tulips are valuable because other people want them, and are therefore
willing to trade other goods or services for them. When a speculatory
bubble develops and a tulip is suddenly worth lots of other goods and
services, the man with lots of tulips is wealthy, not because of some
mystical ``inherent'' value infused into the tulip, but because, at
that time, other people want tulips.
[...]
>Of course, had he sold when the market was inflated, he would have gold
>for which others would divert their resources and efforts. All the
>other fellow would have had was a lousy tulip bulb, which still does no
>more than grow a flower despite the handsome price the bilked customer
>paid. The seller would have increased his claim on the limited
>resources of the world, at someone else's expense. He has a pile of
>gold, which has retained most of its esteem in others' eyes, and is just
>as useful as it always was. The buyer has a plant that has lost most of
>its esteem in others' eyes, and which again is as useful as it always
>was. The seller's real gain is the buyer's real loss.
In this particular case, _ex poste_ the seller's gain was the buyer's
loss. But _ex ante_, both surely expected to gain. That is, when
the buyer bought the bulb, he did so because he thought it would be
worth more in the future, but his expectations were not borne out.
But obviously the workings of financial markets cannot be used to
asert that, in general, one person's loss is another's gain. In
fact, you've already agreed that money is no measure of wealth, and
in your example tulips act much like money or some other asset
subject to speculation. What is true is that when work is done,
when materials are transformed from a less desirable form into a
more desirable form, wealth, by any reasonable measure, is created.
If I take few bits of minerals and a little plastic and build a
Sun workstation, has the total amount of desired objects in the
world increased? Why is work done at all if its logically impossible
to increase the value of matter?
Rick Beckham
Point being, would it have value to someone who doesn't understand
the purpose of its being? And why would it be valued by someone
who understood its purpose? After all, you can't eat it. This
leads back into the question of; why do people attribute value to
this object?
Gordon Fitch
| It all starts with human will. This is sufficient for everything.
| Emotion, or the state of mind of the laborer, is totaly pointless.
Will isn't a state of mind?
| It is what they do that matters.
Everyone around here has been telling me that value
depends on the cognition (necessary for objectifica-
tion) and the desire of an evaluator, and the history
of object is incidental to its value. Now you're
saying that it's action that matters? Or what?
Roger Bryner
> Would this machine tool have value to a 16th century peasant?
> Point being, would it have value to someone who doesn't understand
> the purpose of its being? And why would it be valued by someone
> who understood its purpose? After all, you can't eat it. This
> leads back into the question of; why do people attribute value to
> this object?
Simple, because the have the WILL to aquire, or not aquire it.
This is in comparison to the WILL that the creator of the tool had to have
in order to make it.
He also had to have some metal.<=== no ammount of WILL *CREATES* this.
To each his own.
Roger, no free will just physics-not, Bryner.
Roger Bryner
>bry...@chemistry.utah.edu (Roger Bryner) writes:
>| It all starts with human will. This is sufficient for everything.
>| Emotion, or the state of mind of the laborer, is totaly pointless.
>
>Will isn't a state of mind?
It is a state of mind-body-center.
You don't just think and have will. You have to ACT!
>| It is what they do that matters.
>
>Everyone around here has been telling me that value
>depends on the cognition (necessary for objectifica-
>tion) and the desire of an evaluator, and the history
>of object is incidental to its value. Now you're
>saying that it's action that matters? Or what?
I am saying that action changes the world. I am saying that we(humans)
can work all we want. Our resources are limited.
I think I just beter start a thread between far-left, libertarians, and
greens.
Roger Bryner.
"Education... engrafts a new man of the native stock, and improves
what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue
and social worth. And it cannot be that each generation succeeding
to the knowledge acquired by all those who preceded it, adding to
it their own acquisitions and discoveries, and handing the mass
down for successive and constant accumulation, must advance the
knowledge and well-being of mankind, not infinitely, as some have
said, but indefinitely, and to a term which no one can fix or
foresee."
---Thomas Jefferson, 1818.
Robert Vienneau
>...Steve Gustafson writes:
>>This introduces a subjective quality into the definition that I have
>There is no value to an object aside from the subjective value people
The classical economists in general, and Adam Smith in particular,
operated with several notions of wealth (which is quite distinct from
value) that did not require examining individuals' subjective
preferences.
First, we can consider the heterogeneous collection of necessaries
and conveniences that is produced in a country each year. In describing
these commodities, we take into account those physical properties
that we think are relevant to human concerns. We can also
worry about per capita flows, about how increases in these flows
compare with increase in population.
Second, we can assess an individual's wealth in terms of the labor he
can command or hire with his income. We can also measure the labor
embodied in the goods that he can purchase with his income. (I
don't think the difference between labor commanded and labor
embodied makes much difference for Smith's welfare concerns. It's
fundamental for Clasical value theory, though.)
Third, we can choose some particular basket of commodities in
which to evaluate a flow of income. For a less developed nation,
the most common foodstuff for the masses, that is "corn," might
be a good commodity.
None of these ideas rely on utility theory. In reducing a
heterogeneous mass to a single number, we might need to draw on
a theory of value or price. But that theory need not be
reduced to subjective preferences which cannot be compared
across persons. In fact, we can explicitly introduce our
own moral judgements into the reduction.
I note the labor commanded notion of wealth resembles Steve G.'s
original definition in this thread, except Steve emphasized command
over land-like resources, not labor.
I also note these conceptions of wealth focus attention on a very
important determinate of increasing wealth. The wealth of nations
is much facilitated by increases in productivity and improvements
in skills, crafts, and knowledge.
Finally, I think that based on past discussions, Chris Auld is
likely to find this post Greek. It draws on a paradigm that is
old, but of increasing importance among modern economists. But it
is not the paradigm that Chris has been taught, as far as I can
tell.
Robert Vienneau
------------------
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this
as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem
which it was intended to solve.
-- Karl Popper
------------------
Steve Gustafson
Chris Auld quoth:
SG>This introduces a subjective quality into the definition that I have
>striven to avoid. The way I would see it, the esteem in which other
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>people hold your pictures does not in itself make them more
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>intrinsically desirable or valuable.
>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
CA>There is no value to an object aside from the subjective value people
>place upon. Take a look at the underlined sentence, in short form,
>``The value people place on your picture does not make it more desirable.''
>In what way can an object be desirable if people place no value (esteem)
>upon it? Surely, your argument leads to some ridiculous conclusions --
>if only the material and not their current form matter, we are just
>as wealthy with rotten food as with fresh food and with burned paintings
>as with intact paintings.
No, I wouldn't say that (obviously). Rotten food and burnt paintings
have less to recommend them to be conserved in their present forms, most
of the time. And time and ideas may even give value to rotten food or
burnt paintings. (Rotten food may be wine, cheese, or penicillin; burnt
paintings may sometime become more fashionable than new ones.)
What I am trying to get at is that value is an external, measurable
quality that is only marginally impacted, if at all, by people's
subjective feelings of esteem. From time to time, as in the tulip
mania, those subjective estimates vary widely from the value a
reasonable person would ascribe to the object of desire. He would be a
fool who would devote three month's wages to buy a potted plant. These
mistakes of judgment do not create wealth.
SG>If in the machinations of human folly, people temporarily are willing to
>exchange large quantities of gold for tulip bulbs, and come the next
>week are no longer willing to do so, the bulbs themselves have not
>changed.
CA>Tulips are valuable because other people want them, and are therefore
>willing to trade other goods or services for them. When a speculatory
>bubble develops and a tulip is suddenly worth lots of other goods and
>services, the man with lots of tulips is wealthy, not because of some
>mystical ``inherent'' value infused into the tulip, but because, at
>that time, other people want tulips.
But is there not some -reasonable- value of tulips that, all other
things being equal, would lead you to conclude that several months'
wages is too high a price to pay for one? and that those who would pay
it have been bilked? Your subjective notion of value seems to me to
suggest that the people who bought at the height of the speculative
bubble in tulip bulbs received their money's worth. At least for a few
hours, the owners could bask in the ultimately confounded hope that
their price would soar to new heights.
Emerson said that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will make a
beaten path to your door. Apply -modus tollens- to this maxim, and it
follows that if the world is not beating a path to your door --- if,
instead, you must go out and seek publicity for your wares in print,
radio, and television, or if you must bang on the doors of unwilling
potential buyers or call them uninvited on the phone to propose a sale
--- then, yours must be a mediocre product that is in all likelihood not
worth your asking price. Those who do those things, do them to deprive
people of more of their resources and life than is ethically proper.
The problem is, to form a definition of "wealth" or "value" that
excludes any excess which is the work of such puffery. I'd be guilty of
excess gall if I claimed I had it exactly right; but I don't think that
merely because it is difficult to formulate an objective approach to
value, means that you must therefore choose a subjective one.
CA>In this particular case, _ex poste_ the seller's gain was the buyer's
>loss. But _ex ante_, both surely expected to gain. That is, when
>the buyer bought the bulb, he did so because he thought it would be
>worth more in the future, but his expectations were not borne out.
Of course --- but, in such case, the buyer's hopes were unreasonable, at
least under the eye of eternity, because you would expect people to
realize that even the rarest and fanciest of potted plants just aren't
worth that kind of money. The seller's price, for the same reason, was
morally reprehensible and unjust.
CA>But obviously the workings of financial markets cannot be used to
>asert that, in general, one person's loss is another's gain. In
>fact, you've already agreed that money is no measure of wealth, and
>in your example tulips act much like money or some other asset
>subject to speculation. What is true is that when work is done,
>when materials are transformed from a less desirable form into a
>more desirable form, wealth, by any reasonable measure, is created.
Created -and- destroyed: that is to say, diverted. . . .
CA>If I take few bits of minerals and a little plastic and build a
>Sun workstation, has the total amount of desired objects in the
>world increased? Why is work done at all if its logically impossible
>to increase the value of matter?
Of course, on the one side it has. On the other hand, the silicon is
temporarily unavailable to be incorporated into beer bottles, or
Nintendo machines, and likewise with the plastic. Those things are also
useful; only, at the present time, they are considered less desirable
than the microstation.
In the course of the machinations of human folly, your Sun workstation
may become the cousin of the VT-52 terminals you can buy at electronic
junk sales for $10, materiel for basement tinkerers. And come a hundred
years, it may be an intriguing curiosity. Throughout all these changes,
the workstation is roughly what it always has been. Its inherent
usefulness is not diminished by the esteem or disesteem people have for
its function at any given moment in time. That esteem or disesteem
-may- be what decides whether the microstation, once created, is
retained or recycled into another form.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.
Chris Auld
>Chris Auld writes:
>The classical economists in general, and Adam Smith in particular,
>operated with several notions of wealth (which is quite distinct from
>value) that did not require examining individuals' subjective
>preferences.
Wealth and value, while distinct, are certainly intimately related.
The classical economists _failed_ to create a useful explanation of
value, whereas the neoclassical economists did not. In fact, Smith's
discussion of wealth fails precisely because his discussion of value
fails.
[...]
>Finally, I think that based on past discussions, Chris Auld is
>likely to find this post Greek. It draws on a paradigm that is
>old, but of increasing importance among modern economists. But it
>is not the paradigm that Chris has been taught, as far as I can
>tell.
Here we see Mr. Vienneau persuing his peculiar program of discrediting
graduate education in economics. He assumes that I was never taught
anything about classical economics, and also that there is no way I could
possibly know anything I have not been taught. Following this dubious
logic, we conclude that Mr. Vienneau himself knows nothing at all
about economics, since, as he will readily admit, he has never had
so much as a single class in economics. Since he does know something
about economics, one wonders why he would apply this standard to others.
For his information, I am familiar with classical conceptions of
wealth and value, and I *reject* them in favour of the neoclassical
view. Hence, my argument here is not out of ignorance, as he assumes.
Further, I don't think the classical notion of value is of ``increasing
importance to modern economists'' at all, but I will happily admit
error upon Mr. Vienneau supplying the myriad contempory references
he apparently has in mind.
Mark Slagle
> By your definition, a fellow who owned a tulip bulb during the
> week that people were paying thousands for them was a rich man,
> even if he was not prudent or informed enough to sell while the
> market was hot. Come the next week, the fortune whose very
> existence he may have been unaware of came to ruin. I think
> that in reality he was no richer and no poorer despite these
> unknown events.
The only important issue is whether the owner of the bulb thought
he was richer during the boom. What you think about the nature
of reality with respect to his wealth is unlikely to be of much
interest (or value?) to him.
=Mark
--
----
Mark E. Slagle PO Box 61059
sla...@lmsc.lockheed.com Sunnyvale, CA 94088
408-756-0895 USA
Steve Gustafson
Robert Vienneau quoth:
RV>I note the labor commanded notion of wealth resembles Steve G.'s
>original definition in this thread, except Steve emphasized command
>over land-like resources, not labor.
I confess that I picked this particular standard because I wanted there
to exist limits on the total amount of possible wealth. No human could
own more than the whole earth, at least not within present states of
technology. };-)
I have read some writers and posters who seem to believe that the earth
could support an infinite number of people. As more and more are
brought into being, we'd be under even more powerful incentives to find
ways to feed them and put them to work. Therefore, whether the earth's
population is six billions, ten billions, or goes into the trillions, we
can expect everyone not only to survive, but to survive well. This is
obviously not true; and the challenge is, to put the finger on -why.-
Labour, in this scenario, -can- increase. "Land-like resources" cannot;
and ultimately, all resources are "land-like" resources; they're all
from earth, after all. This seems to me to be the stablest measure of
"wealth." I decided on this principle, not from strictly economic
thinking --- I have but a bachelor's in economics & philosophy, and
those from several years ago; my graduate education is in law and
anthropology --- but from philosophical principles.
How do you decide issues of wealth and poverty in the context of 20th
century America? So much "value," of traded commodities from stocks to
shaving cream, seems to have been put there by puffery. How do you sort
out the real from the fake? It seems to me that you judge the winners
and losers in financial transactions by jotting up the amount of
"land-like resources" each holds in their hand after the dust settles.
Dollars in a bank account may only be illusion --- the more there are,
the likelier they won't be come tomorrow. They are a shifting standard
to quantify wealth. Real winners take home something you can touch.
In the several discussions of this sort I have put my foot into, it
seems to me that there are several -philosophical- questions about the
nature of "wealth" and "value" that go unadressed. There are a whole
lot of unquestioned assumptions "out there" on questions like:
1. Is an ideally efficient capitalist economy something we really
want? If it is achieved, will it improve our lives, or only
improve someone else's lives at our expense?
2. Has the fellow who voluntarily coughed up his life savings for a
handful of tulip bulbs at the height of the tulip mania been
cheated? If so, why? and if not, why not? Has the seller
committed an ethically reprehensible action?
3. Is it ethically right, legally right, or justifiable on other
grounds to sell penicillin to epidemic victims for whatever a few
of them could afford, even though it sells for a far lower price in
places where it is not scarce?
There are many out there who seem to be under the impression that the
answers to these questions are simple and obvious. They typically have
economic answers, but not philosophical ones. I try not to be among
them.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Ungues me, Domine, stercore; asperges me, Domine, urina.
Steve Gustafson
Chris Auld quoth:
CA>Wealth and value, while distinct, are certainly intimately related.
>The classical economists _failed_ to create a useful explanation of
>value, whereas the neoclassical economists did not. In fact, Smith's
>discussion of wealth fails precisely because his discussion of value
>fails.
It strikes me that economics can't say a great deal about the nature of
"value" or "wealth" unaided; at root, those things are not economic
ideas, but -philosophical- ones. How can you speak meaningfully about
relative advantage or disadvantage at trade in goods, unless you know
what "good" is in the first place?
Smith's discussion of value and wealth may well be unsatisfactory; but I
think more could be said for Aristotle's or Aquinas's discussion of the
subject. Those who let economic considerations decide ethical
questions, rather than vice versa, often lack the very concept of
"distributive justice," the philosophical inquiry that asks us what way
of dividing the limited stock of resources that exists at any given time
is the most ethically fair. What really is the goal of economic
activity?
---
. OLX 2.2 . Nitimur in vetitum semper cupimusque negata.
Gordon Fitch
| CA>Wealth and value, while distinct, are certainly intimately related.
| >The classical economists _failed_ to create a useful explanation of
| >value, whereas the neoclassical economists did not. In fact, Smith's
| >discussion of wealth fails precisely because his discussion of value
| >fails.
steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com (Steve Gustafson) writes:
| It strikes me that economics can't say a great deal about the nature of
| "value" or "wealth" unaided; at root, those things are not economic
| ideas, but -philosophical- ones. How can you speak meaningfully about
| relative advantage or disadvantage at trade in goods, unless you know
| what "good" is in the first place?
|
| Smith's discussion of value and wealth may well be unsatisfactory; but I
| think more could be said for Aristotle's or Aquinas's discussion of the
| subject. Those who let economic considerations decide ethical
| questions, rather than vice versa, often lack the very concept of
| "distributive justice," the philosophical inquiry that asks us what way
| of dividing the limited stock of resources that exists at any given time
| is the most ethically fair. What really is the goal of economic
| activity?
Unless we grant some persons more legitimacy (power)
than others, good is whatever people generally say it
is, or show it to be by their actions, especially their
preferences. People may or may not include ethical or
spiritual elements or values in their idea of good;
following Meister Eckhart, who said that God was good
in exactly the same way as an apple was good, I don't
think they are a distinct kind of goodness except for
their abstract and linguistic quality. Hence, value
becomes a matter of individual perception and emotion,
and is more a subject of psychology than philosophy, as
market researchers know. In spite of the fact that at
base the assessment of value is individual, we who
evaluate are highly social animals, and we can compare
evaluations, so that another kind of value emerges which
is social or communal. This is "exchange value."
In some recent articles, I've tried to get at how the
history of a thing can be related to its (exchange)
value. There have been two categories of opinion on
this: one is the labor theory of value, or "*labor" in
my formulation, because I use the term "labor" very
broadly; the other seems to be the Nothing theory of
value, which is that the history of a thing has no
significant bearing on its exchange value.
The difference between these theories emerges in the
definition of "wealth." If by "wealth" we mean
simply "that which is valued", then it would seem that
wealth is entirely a matter of perception and emotion,
of psychology. On the other hand, it is clear that
some things further the production of other things,
including more things of their kind -- for example,
machine tools and computers -- in a way which seems at
least somewhat independent of the way people feel
about them (although they have to like them well
enough to use them).
The latter view -- the view of a semi-autonomous,
self-replicating kind of wealth, and of the
significance of the history of an object to its
exchange value, postulates an "objective" universe,
whereas the opposed view would seem to postulate
a psychic or phenomenal universe without any need
for an objective stratum. I find it odd to find
myself arguing the "objective" side; usually I'm
flogging the realists, so-called. And it's all
Marx's fault.
Roger Bryner
>Of course, on the one side it has. On the other hand, the silicon is
>temporarily unavailable to be incorporated into beer bottles, or
>Nintendo machines, and likewise with the plastic. Those things are also
>useful; only, at the present time, they are considered less desirable
>than the microstation.
Yes, but sand is an infinite resource(almost, like land in the early U.S.)
You are missing the point.
Humans decide what they do with their work.<=====period, unless they are
slaves.
We have finite resources.
Human folly, like buying a tulip bulb with your entire life savings,
will always exist. We shold have charitable insane asilums for the
poor who have done this.
Roger Bryner.
Roger Bryner
>1. Is an ideally efficient capitalist economy something we really
>want? If it is achieved, will it improve our lives, or only
>improve someone else's lives at our expense?
it would not be a problem.
>2. Has the fellow who voluntarily coughed up his life savings for a
>handful of tulip bulbs at the height of the tulip mania been
>cheated? If so, why? and if not, why not? Has the seller
>committed an ethically reprehensible action?
The person who coughed up his life savings is insane. He should
be put in a charatable asilum. The seller is a cad. If anything
he said was fradulent, he should be punished.
>3. Is it ethically right, legally right, or justifiable on other
>grounds to sell penicillin to epidemic victims for whatever a few
>of them could afford, even though it sells for a far lower price in
>places where it is not scarce?
No, use the zero knowledge rule. You must sell at the same price to
all.
If you would like to extend this, what price should doctors charge
for immortality?
Chew on that one.
Roger, Mad Dog Immortal, Bryner.
Roger Bryner
>It strikes me that economics can't say a great deal about the nature of
>"value" or "wealth" unaided; at root, those things are not economic
>ideas, but -philosophical- ones. How can you speak meaningfully about
>relative advantage or disadvantage at trade in goods, unless you know
>what "good" is in the first place?
<deleted crap, cant anyone think for themselves. We do it all the
time in the sciences)
>is the most ethically fair. What really is the goal of economic
>activity?
It has no goal, what is your goal. Mine is FAIRNESS and FUNDIMENTAL
EQAUALITY OF RULES.
Robert Vienneau
>Chris Auld quoth:
>
>>The classical economists _failed_ to create a useful explanation of
>>value, whereas the neoclassical economists did not.
This is exactly backwards. Consider a model in which there is one
non-produced input, homogeneous labor. Suppose production takes time,
ad all goods are produced by processes that require inputs of labor
and produced inputs. (This is a model of production of commodities by
means of commodities.)
Suppose the model is in long term equilibrium in the sense there
is only one uniform price throughout for each good, a single level
of wages, relative spot prices are stationary, and the same rate of
profit prevails for all processes in use. These assumptions
determine a system of equations which can be solved for all prices
with one degree of freedom. This degree of freedom might as well
be taken to be the trade-off between the wage and the rate of profit,
that is, the "factor-price frontier." (If additional non-produced
inputs were introduced, additional degrees of freedom might be
available.)
What happens if one closes the model based on subjective preferences?
Introduce the condition that prices must equate Supply and Demand,
where given Utility functions provide the ultimate basis for the
demand of consumption goods and the supply of factor services. Then
prices become overdetermined. The model is inconsistent. (Special
assumptions can be imposed on endowments and the shapes of utility
functions such that their introduction leaves the model consistent
and still open.)
So suppose one wants to make sense out of the flux of observable
prices by postulating that at any moment there are centers of attraction,
an equilibrium position that the economy is approaching. Subjective
preferences and utility functions, in general, can play no role in
characterizing that equilibrium position. Rather it is determined by
objective conditions of production and the distribution of a produced
surplus. If one chooses, one can develop a theory of distribution
based on class struggle. Most of those who understand the mathematics,
I think, consciously look at this approach as a rebirth of Classical
economics. They don't have much use, however, for the labor theory
of value. (For more about the collapse of Neoclassical theory, see
"Sraffa, Piero" and related entries in _The_New_Palgrave_.)
If one wants to retain utility theory, one can abandon long-run
equilibrium. The Classicals distinguished between "market price"
and "natural price." Market prices are determined by Supply and Demand.
Likewise, utility can be a determinate of shortrun prices, but
then so are expectations. Because of expectations, prices can
move anyways. The short run does not provide an organizing principle
upon which to base economics. (For a detailed investigation
of the short run, see Hicks _Value_and_Capital_.)
Robert Vienneau
Robert Vienneau
>How do you decide issues of wealth and poverty in the context of 20th
>century America? So much "value," of traded commodities from stocks to
>shaving cream, seems to have been put there by puffery. How do you sort
>out the real from the fake? It seems to me that you judge the winners
>and losers in financial transactions by jotting up the amount of
>"land-like resources" each holds in their hand after the dust settles.
>Dollars in a bank account may only be illusion --- the more there are,
>the likelier they won't be come tomorrow. They are a shifting standard
>to quantify wealth. Real winners take home something you can touch.
What you're talking about is trading at disequilibrium prices, the
possibility of buying at one price and selling at another in a nearby
market. The Classical economists called this "Profit on alienation."
This has always been viewed with suspicion.
But the Classicals thought there was another source of profit, the
ability to generate a physical surplus. Seed corn is planted in the
Spring, and the harvest generates enough corn to replace the seed with
some left over. Each year laborers work up inputs into produced
commodities. After replacing the inputs and providing the consumption
the laborers need to subsist during the period of production, more is
left over. According to the Classicals, these physical conditions
provide an organizing principle that drives the economy. Here is
a source of surplus that does not depend on buying low and selling
high, on cheating others out of the full value of their goods.
According to Marx, these physical conditions explain how labor
is necessarily exploited under Capitalism, even though all contracts
are entered voluntarily, nobody is cheated out of the full value of
the commodity which they supply, and everybody is free to follow their
own interest. Yet laborers are not paid the full fruits of their labor.
Trading at disequilibrium prices, "false trading" in technical jargon
raises some very challenging questions for Neoclassical General
Equilirium and Welfare theory. The primary focus in Welfare theory is
Pareto optimality. One state of the economy is a Pareto improvement
over another if some think they are better off in their own judgement
in the former state than the latter, and nobody thinks they are worse
off. Pareto optimality has a close connection with competitive
equilibrium, and is often used to justify free markets. But the
definition takes the initial distribution of endowments as given.
Economists are always trying to locate some concept of "efficiency," of
"purely economic issues," of ways to make statements about "production"
seperate from value judgements about "distribution," of locating some
sphere where interest harmony prevails. Pareto optimality is just the
latest of many flawed attempts for doing this.
But consider what happens if "false trading" occurs during an
approach to competitive equilibrium, which would otherwise be
Pareto optimal. The initial distribution of endowments is disturbed.
Pareto optimality is no longer well-defined. Standard welfare economics
falls apart.
This is no accident. Walras designed General Equilibrium theory to
examine the consistency of certain notions he had about justice in
exchange and to provide a foundation for discussing distributive
justice, not for modeling capitalist reality. He thought profit
on alienation, obtaining profit on arbitrage, was morally wrong.
Therefore he assumed no false trading in his model, although
agents desire for profit drives the approach to equilibrium.
So philosophical questions are indeed embedded in economics,
particularly Neoclassical price theory. Your example of tulips bulbs
during the tulip mania is a good example for bringing out these
problems. (And these questions run a lot deeper than the libertarian
belief that everybody should be free to seek his own self interest.)
Robert Vienneau
---------------------------------------------------------------
Free competition procures maximum effective utility WITHIN THE
LIMITS OF THE CONDITION OF UNIFORMITY OF PRICE, in other words
a relative, not an absolute maximum. It is perfectly clear that
if one supposes commodities to be sold at a high price to the rich
and at a low price to the poor, all that the rich will compelled
to forego are luxuries, while the poor will be able to afford
necessities, and [consequently] there will be a considerable
increase in effective utility...It remains, however, to be seen
whether uniformity of price is required by justice. This is a
question which falls outside the purview of pure economics, but
which I shall be very careful to examine in that part of our
science which deals with the distribution of wealth and in
which considerations of social ethics must enter. All I can say
for the present, and I think you will agree, is that the object is
not an absolute maximum of economic welfare, but a maximum
economic welfare COMPATIBLE WITH JUSTICE.
-- Leon Walras
---------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Gustafson
SG> How can you speak meaningfully about
> relative advantage or disadvantage at trade in goods, unless you know
> what "good" is in the first place?
Gordon Fitch quoth:
GF>Unless we grant some persons more legitimacy (power)
>than others, good is whatever people generally say it
>is, or show it to be by their actions, especially their
>preferences.
Here is the first and perhaps the most dubious assumption of all. Of
course, some people's ideas really do have more legitimacy than others.
It may be expected of us now to pretend otherwise at many times, but
nobody really acts that way. What's more, it is for the best that some
people's ideas are granted more legitimacy. We go nowhere if we accept
the beliefs of the gentleman from the Flat Earth Society on an even
basis with those of the mapmakers at Rand McNally. At least, I hope the
flat earther didn't draw up the flight plans for my next trip.
Let's forget make-believe egalitarianism. It is only a socially
compelled untruth we are expected to pay lip service to.
GF>Hence, value
>becomes a matter of individual perception and emotion,
>and is more a subject of psychology than philosophy, as
>market researchers know.
Yes --- and this is the problem. Market researchers only operate
because there -is- a -real- standard of value that is independent of
individual perception and emotion. They represent a typical face of the
corrupted endeavour of late capitalism.
Their purpose is to convince that portion of the population that is
susceptible to being so misled, that some difference exists between a
Brand A molecule of aspirin and a Brand X molecule of aspirin, so as to
justify charging them a higher price for Brand A, in hopes the poor
dupes will be satisfied with its entirely illusory superiority.
Because -in reality- aspirin molecules are perfectly fungible, their
efforts allow Brand A to charge more for an identical product. This
unearned excess also keeps the flacks in business. It may be that some
abstract notion of liberty requires us to endure this. It is much less
clear in my mind that this sort of puffery improves the efficiency of
the provision of goods and services, or adds value to the products whose
prices are inflated by these devices.
Your counter-example does not undermine the fact that goods and services
have a -real- value that often differs from individuals' subjective
impression of their worth. Advertisers and market researchers exist in
order to exaggerate and exploit these differences. If they represented
something real, there would be no advantage to their services.
GF>The latter view -- the view of a semi-autonomous,
>self-replicating kind of wealth, and of the
>significance of the history of an object to its
>exchange value, postulates an "objective" universe,
>whereas the opposed view would seem to postulate
>a psychic or phenomenal universe without any need
>for an objective stratum. I find it odd to find
>myself arguing the "objective" side; usually I'm
>flogging the realists, so-called. And it's all
>Marx's fault.
Just so.
---
. OLX 2.2 . You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
D. Anton Sherwood
>
>Their purpose is to convince that portion of the population that is
>susceptible to being so misled, that some difference exists between a
>Brand A molecule of aspirin and a Brand X molecule of aspirin, so as to
>justify charging them a higher price for Brand A, in hopes the poor
>dupes will be satisfied with its entirely illusory superiority.
>
>Because -in reality- aspirin molecules are perfectly fungible, their
>efforts allow Brand A to charge more for an identical product.
aren't there differences in purity and the fillers used?
> This
>unearned excess also keeps the flacks in business. It may be that some
>abstract notion of liberty requires us to endure this. It is much less
>clear in my mind that this sort of puffery improves the efficiency of
>the provision of goods and services, or adds value to the products whose
>prices are inflated by these devices.
No, but _allowing_ this sort of puffery to go on unmolested enhances
our standard of living over the alternative.
--
Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* DAS...@netcom.com
Bureau of Making Sure You Get Enough Sleep and Eat Your Vegetables
Erich Schwarz
(Steve Gustafson) wrote:
> goods and services
> have a -real- value that often differs from individuals' subjective
> impression of their worth. Advertisers and market researchers exist in
> order to exaggerate and exploit these differences. If they represented
> something real, there would be no advantage to their services.
You're assuming that rhetoric is not an genuine skill, and that
information is both free and qualitatively uniform. None of these
assumptions are true, in my experience. Advertisers are paid to announce
the fact of a product's existence in a rhetorically effective enough manner
that the public (which must pay attention briefly to a great many things)
will nevertheless be intrigued enough to seriously notice the existence of
that product.
Information is only valuable to that public if it is entertaining or
informative enough to be worth noticing; without at least one of these
qualities, it is valueless noise. While we on the Internet undoubtedly
like to believe that we are such intellectual demi-gods that we here are
*only* driven by the "informative" tropism, the fact is that most human
beings, including this writer, are more likely to notice and remember a
datum if it is pleasurable in some way (even if the "pleasure" is the
hostile one of knowing about a potential threat before it injures me.)
A few human beings have the talent of reproducibly making car tires
pleasurable to read about. They can get paid money to write
advertisements, at least until the economy supporting them goes into a
permanent slump (the U.S.'s present condition...)
Most other human beings--although they THINK that they have that
talent--do not...or at least not well enough to hold their own at Ogilvy
and Mather or its congeners, especially during that permanent slump I just
mentioned.
The practical result: If one company writes its own ads, while its
competitor has its advertisements written by professionals, the former
company is likely to alienate its potential customers if it is not simply
ignored by them. Meanwhile, its competitor will, at least, be likely to
not commit either blunder. This translates into an objective advantage for
the competitor, even if each company produces the same goods and *intends*
to describe them identically.
It is, therefore, rational to pay advertisers to tout one's product:
because, as soon as one gets beyond the village-fair level of commerce, the
law of comparative advantage operates in communication as much as in any
other aspect of free enterprise. I don't think that advertising "refutes"
the idea that value has some meaningful basis.
--Erich Schwarz / schwarze...@starbase1.caltech.edu
Gordon Fitch
| SG> How can you speak meaningfully about
| > relative advantage or disadvantage at trade in goods, unless you know
| > what "good" is in the first place?
gcf:
| GF>Unless we grant some persons more legitimacy (power)
| >than others, good is whatever people generally say it
| >is, or show it to be by their actions, especially their
| >preferences.
sg:
| Here is the first and perhaps the most dubious assumption of all. Of
| course, some people's ideas really do have more legitimacy than others.
|
| It may be expected of us now to pretend otherwise at many times, but
| nobody really acts that way. What's more, it is for the best that some
| people's ideas are granted more legitimacy. We go nowhere if we accept
| the beliefs of the gentleman from the Flat Earth Society on an even
| basis with those of the mapmakers at Rand McNally. At least, I hope the
| flat earther didn't draw up the flight plans for my next trip.
|
| Let's forget make-believe egalitarianism. It is only a socially
| compelled untruth we are expected to pay lip service to.
On the contrary, I never forget my make-believe
egalitarianism. For instance, I have little reason, other
than aesthetics, to concern myself with the shape of the
earth, but when I did (I once wrote programs which processed
surveying data) I consulted scientific works on the matter.
Science, as I am sure you know, relies on a principle of
verifiability through conformance to phenomena, not
authority. Thus, if I had doubted any of the information I
was looking at, it would have been easy to find its
derivation, and make observations or experiments of my own.
It is precisely this rejection of authority that makes
science possible. Just so, it is the rejection of kings and
popes and holy writ that makes political progress possible
-- indeed, almost any use of the mind whatever.
Of course, by "progress" I mean _my_ view of progress, and
not the mere replacement of kings and popes and holy writ
with bourgeoisie, bureaucracy, and science-as-scripture. If
this was as far as we were going to get, we might as well
not have started; the former lot at least had a sense of
beauty.
gcf:
| GF>Hence, value
| >becomes a matter of individual perception and emotion,
| >and is more a subject of psychology than philosophy, as
| >market researchers know.
sg:
| Yes --- and this is the problem. Market researchers only operate
| because there -is- a -real- standard of value that is independent of
| individual perception and emotion. They represent a typical face of the
| corrupted endeavour of late capitalism. ...
| Your counter-example does not undermine the fact that goods and services
| have a -real- value that often differs from individuals' subjective
| impression of their worth. Advertisers and market researchers exist in
| order to exaggerate and exploit these differences. If they represented
| something real, there would be no advantage to their services.
But value cannot exist without an evaluator. Value is
either a relationship between an evaluator and a thing she
evaluates (use-value) or it is a complex of such values in
comparison with one another in a market (exchange value).
To postulate yet a third kind of value, one that is
independent of either use-value or exchange value, one has
to postulate a god or the like who objectifies things and
evaluates them on some higher, more "real" level than the
level of phenomena. But I see no evidence for such a god
and until one is demonstrated, I think we must stick to the
kinds of value we do agree exist: use-value and exchange-
value, which will vary from person to person and from
community to community.
It would be convenient to have a god to show up and
straighten these matters out, but while waiting for her, we
have to do the best we can without invisible realer-than-
thou realities. And actually, convenience or not, I would
prefer that this god stay away, as I have enough trouble
with the human race and need no divine kickings-around into
the bargain.
In regard to advertisers, one of the interesting aspects of
modern advertising which is now fairly well established is
that it actually contributes to the utility of its subjects.
People who drink Coke, smoke Marlboros, drink Bud, drive
Jeeps, and so on, not only enjoy the products for
themselves, which is sometimes rather difficult, but -- and
perhaps primarily -- participate in a public pastime or
ritual in which they become part of the advertising. There
are many more 4x4s grazing in suburban driveways than will
ever climb to the top of a sunset-drenched mountain, but
their owners can witness the same on television and
participate in its truth. Who are we to say they are wrong?
(And, as John Lennon added, "Who are we? Who are we
indeed?")
Chris Auld
>>>The classical economists _failed_ to create a useful explanation of
>>>value, whereas the neoclassical economists did not.
>
>This is exactly backwards. Consider a model in which there is one
>non-produced input, homogeneous labor. Suppose production takes time,
>ad all goods are produced by processes that require inputs of labor
>and produced inputs. (This is a model of production of commodities by
>means of commodities.)
[ Outline of Sraffian/Marxist PCMC deleted. ]
Mr. Vienneau neglects to mention that constant returns to scale
and no substitution of inputs have been smuggled surreptiously into
the model he discussed. This model is influential amongst radical and
post-Keynesian economists eager to preserve a labour theory of value
(he is wrong to claim that such theorists have ``little use'' for the
LTV, while Sraffa's theory is different from Marx's, equilibrium value
*is* simply dated labour in Sraffa's account), but largely ignored by the
majority of the economic community.
>(For more about the collapse of Neoclassical theory, see
>"Sraffa, Piero" and related entries in _The_New_Palgrave_.)
The ``collapse of Neoclassical theory'' !?!
Mr. Vienneau is surely pulling our collective leg here. Whether he
likes it or not, neoclassical economics is the dominant paradigm in
modern economics, has been for a long time, and shows no sign of
losing ground to any competing theories. In particular, the Sraffian
attack he claims ``collapses'' the neoclassical system dates to 1926,
and, as I've mentioned, has few adherents. I'm afraid if this is
his support for his contention that classical theories of value are
``of increasing importance to modern economists,'' he ought to think
again.
Steve Gustafson
Robert Vienneau quoth:
SG>How do you decide issues of wealth and poverty in the context of 20th
>century America? So much "value," of traded commodities from stocks to
>shaving cream, seems to have been put there by puffery.
RV>What you're talking about is trading at disequilibrium prices, the
>possibility of buying at one price and selling at another in a nearby
>market. The Classical economists called this "Profit on alienation."
>This has always been viewed with suspicion.
It certainly is a part of it. What's more, in late 20th century America
this kind of activity seems to have had an allure more potent than
traditional sorts of economic endeavour like invention and
manufacturing. We have more financiers than engineers, and if
successful, they are better paid. In the meantime, we endure rusting
factories and uncompetitiveness in our core strategic industries,
something you wouldn't seem to expect in a nation so busy with
"investment" activity. There does seem to be something out of kilter
with the financial markets.
RV>But the Classicals thought there was another source of profit, the
>ability to generate a physical surplus. Seed corn is planted in the
>Spring, and the harvest generates enough corn to replace the seed with
>some left over. Each year laborers work up inputs into produced
>commodities. After replacing the inputs and providing the consumption
>the laborers need to subsist during the period of production, more is
>left over. According to the Classicals, these physical conditions
>provide an organizing principle that drives the economy. Here is
>a source of surplus that does not depend on buying low and selling
>high, on cheating others out of the full value of their goods.
Again, though, from my perspective it seems to me that those gains carry
an extra "cost"; that is, of diverting the land and resources from other
potential uses.
I practised law in a mostly rural state in the USA during the mid
1980's, when the farm credit crisis was at its worst. It struck me that
the farmers who appeared at my doorstep seemed to be stuck in a rut;
every year they would plant maize and soybeans, and more maize and
soybeans, because that's the kind of farming they knew. The farmers who
planted barley, or planted clover and kept bees, or grew Christmas trees
were usually profitable even when they too were up to their ears in
debt.
RV>This is no accident. Walras designed General Equilibrium theory to
>examine the consistency of certain notions he had about justice in
>exchange and to provide a foundation for discussing distributive
>justice, not for modeling capitalist reality. He thought profit
>on alienation, obtaining profit on arbitrage, was morally wrong.
"A contract for the sale and future delivery of a commodity on margins,
. . if no delivery is contemplated, and the intention of the parties is
merely to speculate on the rise or fall of the market, and adjust the
account between them by paying or receiving the difference between the
contract and current price. . . is an unlawful wager, against public
policy and void, and will not be enforced at law." SONDHEIM v. GILBERT
(1889) 18 N.E. 687, 117 Ind. 71, 5 L.R.A. 432, 10 Am.St.Rep. 23. This
is probably no longer the law. Federal law now extensively regulates
the markets our great-grandfathers condemned as casinoes, with a view
towards sustaining them rather than abolishing them.
Over the last hundred years, there does seem to have been a rather
dramatic shift in attitudes towards this sort of purely speculative
activity.
RV>So philosophical questions are indeed embedded in economics,
>particularly Neoclassical price theory. Your example of tulips bulbs
>during the tulip mania is a good example for bringing out these
>problems. (And these questions run a lot deeper than the libertarian
>belief that everybody should be free to seek his own self interest.)
As I have unsuccessfully tried to impress net libertarians with,
"property rights," "contracts," and "markets" are all of them -legal-
concepts before they are economic concepts. We can shape the kinds of
markets we will have, and the shape of the economy, by choosing what we
will recognize as a property right, and what sort of contracts we will
choose to honour.
Making those decisions is a function of lawmakers, and the lines to be
drawn are things about which reasonable people can differ; they are not
moral givens. The existence of a government-provided recorder's office,
where deeds and interests in land are kept straight, profoundly changes
the shape of the markets for land, mortgage lending, and other economic
or contractual activities. Deciding to have such a system seems to me
to be ultimately a question of values and social policy.
There seems to me to be no natural right to have your deed recorded at a
government office. Some might even say that the existence of the office
constitutes government meddling in private affairs, or interference with
economic transactions. It certainly does --- it deprives private or
secret arrangements involving land titles, which are not disclosed to
the public and to the government, of practically all of their value.
"Libertarian" doctrine seems to condemn the very existence of the
recorder's office. Without it, though, real property itself would be a
very risky thing to own, and decline in value for no other reason.
The conclusion from this --- you only have those property rights or
contract rights that lawmakers are willing to honour --- knocks out the
keystone of libertarian social and economic dogma.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Where quality is just a word we like to use.
Steve Gustafson
Anton Sherwood quoth:
SG>Because -in reality- aspirin molecules are perfectly fungible, their
>efforts allow Brand A to charge more for an identical product.
DAS>aren't there differences in purity and the fillers used?
I can't recall these differences ever being the themes of a painkiller
ad campaign --- and bear in mind the campaigns are designed by trained
professionals to be memorable.
SG>unearned excess also keeps the flacks in business. It may be that some
>abstract notion of liberty requires us to endure this. It is much less
>clear in my mind that this sort of puffery improves the efficiency of
>the provision of goods and services, or adds value to the products whose
>prices are inflated by these devices.
DAS>No, but _allowing_ this sort of puffery to go on unmolested enhances
>our standard of living over the alternative.
How? By making us pay more for the same products? This sort of thing
might enhance somebody's standard of living --- but not mine.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Nulla intus Deum effigie, vacuam sedem et inania arcana.
Steve Gustafson
Erich Schwarz quoth:
SG> Advertisers and market researchers exist in
> order to exaggerate and exploit these differences. If they represented
> something real, there would be no advantage to their services.
ES>You're assuming that rhetoric is not an genuine skill, and that
>information is both free and qualitatively uniform. None of these
>assumptions are true, in my experience. Advertisers are paid to announce
>the fact of a product's existence in a rhetorically effective enough manner
>that the public (which must pay attention briefly to a great many things)
>will nevertheless be intrigued enough to seriously notice the existence of
>that product.
I don't believe that I assumed anything like that. Indeed, the belief
that it is needful to publicise the fact of a product's existence
assumes one of the oligopoly markets that are so common in contemporary
American society. In these markets, price competition is minimal, and
the true competition is between a handful of major firms for a limited
market share. Wheat farmers spend hardly anything touting the virtues
over their wheat over Farmer Brown's.
The "brand name loyalty" which advertisers seek to induce and nurture is
very little more than a willingness to pay a higher price for one brand
name out of a group of very similar products.
Remember Emerson: if you build a better mousetrap, the world will make a
beaten path to your door. It follows from this that if the world is not
beating a path to your door --- if you must instead go out and beg for
attention to the fact that you have mousetraps for sale --- your
mousetraps must be mediocre or overpriced.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Deputy Dan will find us no matter how far away we go.
Glen Raphael
>Anton Sherwood quoth:
>SG>Because -in reality- aspirin molecules are perfectly fungible, their
>>efforts allow Brand A to charge more for an identical product.
>DAS>aren't there differences in purity and the fillers used?
>I can't recall these differences ever being the themes of a painkiller
>ad campaign --- and bear in mind the campaigns are designed by trained
>professionals to be memorable.
Irrelevant. The generics can differ from the brand names in purity,
fillers, the level of testing they've undergone, and the level of quality
control excercised over the production process. Since a Name Brand has
a huge investment in public goodwill that Brand X does not, the Name
Brand has a greater incentive to ensure the safety of the product than
Brand X does. So when you buy the Name Brand, you have a lower risk of
death than when you buy Brand X.
One piece of evidence that consumers are aware of this is that although
many adults buy generic aspirin for themselves, they are much less likely
to buy generic CHILDREN'S aspirin for their kids. Parents won't take as
many chances with their children's health as they will with their own;
this is consistent across a wide range of behaviors.
Name brands contain an informational value that customers are willing to
pay for. They provide information about the safety and consistency of
the product.
Glen Raphael
rap...@fx.com
D. Anton Sherwood
>SG>Because -in reality- aspirin molecules are perfectly fungible, their
>>efforts allow Brand A to charge more for an identical product.
>
>DAS>aren't there differences in purity and the fillers used?
>
>I can't recall these differences ever being the themes of a painkiller
>ad campaign --- and bear in mind the campaigns are designed by trained
>professionals to be memorable.
Bufferin's main selling point is that it's easier on the stomach.
Bayer's is that it is "trusted". Anacin is distinctive in containing
caffeine.
>DAS> ... _allowing_ this sort of puffery to go on unmolested enhances
>>our standard of living over the alternative.
>
>How? By making us pay more for the same products? This sort of thing
>might enhance somebody's standard of living --- but not mine.
The alternative is limiting the freedom of speech. Giving the state
this tool is a dangerous precedent.
D. Anton Sherwood
> We have more financiers than engineers, and if
>successful, they are better paid.
This could mean that there are severe mispricings, hence opportunities
for profit from arbitrage; or that innovation is somehow discouraged;
or both.
> In the meantime, we endure rusting
>factories and uncompetitiveness in our core strategic industries,
>something you wouldn't seem to expect in a nation so busy with
>"investment" activity. There does seem to be something out of kilter
>with the financial markets.
Seems to me this tells us there is something out of kilter with the
non-financial sectors. The question is not why financial juggling
is profitable, but why manufacturing is not!
>As I have unsuccessfully tried to impress net libertarians with,
>"property rights," "contracts," and "markets" are all of them -legal-
>concepts before they are economic concepts. We can shape the kinds of
>markets we will have, and the shape of the economy, by choosing what we
>will recognize as a property right, and what sort of contracts we will
>choose to honour.
What are some examples of invalid contracts?
>Making those decisions is a function of lawmakers, and the lines to be
>drawn are things about which reasonable people can differ; they are not
>moral givens.
The standard libertarian line is that they emerge from individual
contracts through custom.
> [discussion of government records of land title]
Why shouldn't all record-keeping be done by private entities?
Kennel clubs (recording dogs' bloodlines) are a good example.
>The conclusion from this --- you only have those property rights or
>contract rights that lawmakers are willing to honour --- knocks out the
>keystone of libertarian social and economic dogma.
Naah -- libertarians just want to decentralize lawmaking.
Steve Gustafson
Gordon Fitch quoth:
GF>Unless we grant some persons more legitimacy (power)
>than others, good is whatever people generally say it
>is, or show it to be by their actions, especially their
>preferences.
SG> Here is the first and perhaps the most dubious assumption of all. Of
> course, some people's ideas really do have more legitimacy than others.
> It may be expected of us now to pretend otherwise at many times, but
> nobody really acts that way.
> Let's forget make-believe egalitarianism. It is only a socially
> compelled untruth we are expected to pay lip service to.
GF>Science, as I am sure you know, relies on a principle of
>verifiability through conformance to phenomena, not
>authority. Thus, if I had doubted any of the information I
>was looking at, it would have been easy to find its
>derivation, and make observations or experiments of my own.
>It is precisely this rejection of authority that makes
>science possible. Just so, it is the rejection of kings and
>popes and holy writ that makes political progress possible
>-- indeed, almost any use of the mind whatever.
The last hundred and fifty years of experimentation with popular,
unlimited democracy has to my mind proven itself to be the exact
opposite of progress. Under various aristocratic or "elitist" polities,
it is occasionally possible to find individuals with true courage and
moral worth elevated to power. Under populist democracies, they are
systematically excluded.
Whatever you might say against the Churches of Rome or Lenin --- and I
admit, there is a great deal to be said against both --- they
represented unifying doctrines that at least masked petty hatreds, and
an intellectual tradition that could generate subtlety, if not truth.
When the hand of authority they represented was partly withdrawn,
hundreds of petty feuds were unleashed, and the resulting bloodbaths may
yet be the equal of the ones the institutions themselves sponsored.
Democracy shows us that the "masses" are still the same old peasants
they have ever been. As every American knows, they are easily swayed by
appeals to "tradition," and by fear that witches might be hiding in the
trees. I see no progress in allowing such people to vote for
politicians who are ever eager to reassure the peasants that they share
their traditions and fears, that those who scoff at their cherished
ancient ways shall be put down, and that it's time to call out the
pitchforks and torches and go hunt the boogeyman.
To hope otherwise, to believe that some political doctrine or
educational plan can change the eternal peasant, lift him up and create
a society of intellectual equals, is akin to the ancient fantasy that
lead can be turned to gold. I think it is a hard truth for those reared
in conventional democratic pieties to face, but it is nonetheless true:
the preservation of liberty and intellectual values requires that the
common people be occasionally restrained by their superiors.
Every reformer or political utopian already knows in his secret heart of
hearts that he is smarter than the common man. This, especially, is the
unspoken appeal of all of the varieties of Marxism, from its early
revolutionary days to its latterday incarnation as cynical
"post-modernism." Why not be honest with ourselves?
GF>In regard to advertisers, one of the interesting aspects of
>modern advertising which is now fairly well established is
>that it actually contributes to the utility of its subjects.
>People who drink Coke, smoke Marlboros, drink Bud, drive
>Jeeps, and so on, not only enjoy the products for
>themselves, which is sometimes rather difficult, but -- and
>perhaps primarily -- participate in a public pastime or
>ritual in which they become part of the advertising. There
>are many more 4x4s grazing in suburban driveways than will
>ever climb to the top of a sunset-drenched mountain, but
>their owners can witness the same on television and
>participate in its truth.
This suggests to me that the artificial cyber-reality researchers are
using a lot of time and costly equipment in what is in fact a wholly
redundant project.
---
. OLX 2.2 . "Television is democracy at its ugliest" - P. Chayefsky
Steve Gustafson
Gordon Fitch quoth:
GF>I believe that human beings are slowly recovering from a
>kind of psychosis which developed when, having overcome
>many of their survival problems, a large part of their
>brains (probably developed originally for complex compu-
>tations involving the oscillation of branches in trees)
>essentially ran wild. One element of this recovery, if
>it is a recovery, will be gradual transformation of
>culture into something that can deal with human pro-
>pensities toward violence, sadism, greed, and
>destruction.
Helas, culture cannot "deal with human propensities toward violence,
sadism, greed, and destruction." Our instincts of intra-species
aggression, social hierarchies and "pecking orders," group loyalties and
suspicion of strangers, territorialism, and sex role differentiation are
with us always. We have not "learned" to do those things, unless you
count fifteen million years of primate evolution as our "teacher." They
come with the package of being primates.
In short, they are hardwired into our genes. Lecturing people about
these behaviours will be as effective as lecturing teenage boys not to
masturbate. They might feel guilty, or worry they'll catch a disease or
go to Hell; but they'll do it anyways.
It is no mere accident of history, politics, or economy that
the fanciest fruits of human technology are weapons aimed by one tribe
at the tribe across the water. For that matter, when Leonardo da Vinci
drew a paycheck for engineering, he earned it by designing
fortifications and new weapons and siege machines.
Our intelligence and "culture" came into being to serve these instincts,
not to master them. When they try, they swiftly find themselves
outranked. Only a tiny, mutant minority ever wins even partly free of
them; a fact that will be easily confirmed by observing human behaviour
in the aggregate. The real goal of attainable human politics, from
Plato's day to our own, is to put that thinking minority in a position
where it can at least hope to restrain the rest.
---
. OLX 2.2 . "The People", sir, are a great beast. - A. Hamilton
Gordon Fitch
| GF>I believe that human beings are slowly recovering from a
| >kind of psychosis which developed when, having overcome
| >many of their survival problems, a large part of their
| >brains (probably developed originally for complex compu-
| >tations involving the oscillation of branches in trees)
| >essentially ran wild. One element of this recovery, if
| >it is a recovery, will be gradual transformation of
| >culture into something that can deal with human pro-
| >pensities toward violence, sadism, greed, and
| >destruction.
steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com (Steve Gustafson) writes:
| Helas, culture cannot "deal with human propensities toward violence,
| sadism, greed, and destruction." Our instincts of intra-species
| aggression, social hierarchies and "pecking orders," group loyalties and
| suspicion of strangers, territorialism, and sex role differentiation are
| with us always. We have not "learned" to do those things, unless you
| count fifteen million years of primate evolution as our "teacher." They
| come with the package of being primates.
|
| In short, they are hardwired into our genes. ...
My admittedly amateur studies of animals which, though
amateur, have been close and lengthy, have convinced me
that the very degree to which humans are "psychotic" or
"psychopathic", that is, depart from the habits which order
the lives of other mammals, gives hope as well as fear. If
greed, sadism, and violence can run wild in humans because
of excess brain capacity, that same excess brain capacity
may be able to evolve a culture which will obviate or at
least deflect these drives. If it does not, humans as we
know them will simply eliminate themselves as a species, as
they appear to have come close to doing in this century.
Or as Albert Einstein put it: "Formerly, man could not do
as he desired. Now, he can do as he desires; and he must
either change his desires, or perish."
Gordon Fitch
| GF>Unless we grant some persons more legitimacy (power)
| >than others, good is whatever people generally say it
| >is, or show it to be by their actions, especially their
| >preferences.
steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com (Steve Gustafson):
| SG> Here is the first and perhaps the most dubious assumption of all. Of
| > course, some people's ideas really do have more legitimacy than others.
| > It may be expected of us now to pretend otherwise at many times, but
| > nobody really acts that way.
| > Let's forget make-believe egalitarianism. It is only a socially
| > compelled untruth we are expected to pay lip service to.
gcf:
| > ... Just so, it is the rejection of kings and
| >popes and holy writ that makes political progress possible
| >-- indeed, almost any use of the mind whatever.
sg:
| The last hundred and fifty years of experimentation with popular,
| unlimited democracy has to my mind proven itself to be the exact
| opposite of progress. Under various aristocratic or "elitist" polities,
| it is occasionally possible to find individuals with true courage and
| moral worth elevated to power. Under populist democracies, they are
| systematically excluded.
So much the better. I would say that power is a sin, but I
do not want to get into a theological argument, so I will
say only that to me, it is a kind of crime. An individual
with true courage and moral worth belongs -- is -- in
opposition to it.
sg:
| Whatever you might say against the Churches of Rome or Lenin --- and I
| admit, there is a great deal to be said against both --- they
| represented unifying doctrines that at least masked petty hatreds, and
| an intellectual tradition that could generate subtlety, if not truth.
| When the hand of authority they represented was partly withdrawn,
| hundreds of petty feuds were unleashed, and the resulting bloodbaths may
| yet be the equal of the ones the institutions themselves sponsored.
They will probably be exactly the equal, because those
institutions did not mask but organized the evil they
covered. Removing the covering is a positive step toward
cleaning up what is underneath. We should not be surprised
that it is foul; as above, so below.
sg:
| ... I think it is a hard truth for those reared
| in conventional democratic pieties to face, but it is nonetheless true:
| the preservation of liberty and intellectual values requires that the
| common people be occasionally restrained by their superiors.
I am neither pious nor a democrat. I see in democracy a
kind of provisional defense against certain kinds of
political psychopathy, which has often worked, far better
at least than other schemes. It is the "superiors",
manifestly, who need restraining by the common people, and
not the other way around. The wickedness of a George Bush
is not often found in bus drivers; if a bus driver walked
into a city and killed thousands of people in order to keep
her job, we would find her a remarkable bus driver indeed.
Erich Schwarz
(Steve Gustafson) wrote:
>
[To-and-fro: is advertising a sign of capitalism in decadence?]
> Remember Emerson: if you build a better mousetrap, the world will make a
> beaten path to your door. It follows from this that if the world is not
> beating a path to your door --- if you must instead go out and beg for
> attention to the fact that you have mousetraps for sale --- your
> mousetraps must be mediocre or overpriced.
Uh-huh. Let's see you try Emersonian marketing in 1993.
Kary Mullis, the inventor of the Nobel-Prize winning procedure
"polymerase chain reaction" (PCR), had a horrible time convincing anybody
in the mainstream molecular biology community (in 1985) that it was
worthwhile. It was only when Cetus Corporation started vigorously
advertising mass-produced, streamlined *kits* for PCR that anybody seemed
to notice that the entire field of molecular biology had been
revolutionized. Four years later, there is no worthwhile mol. biol. lab
that doesn't do PCR, and Mullis has a Nobel. Simply inventing a
"mousetrap" is *NOT* enough--people have to be convinced that it's worth
buying a funny metal thing that does the work of a cat!!
That's a very recent and egregious example. But biology (and science in
general) are full of stuff like that. It is just not true that a beautiful
invention automatically generates its own market. In fact, the stranger
and more amazing it is, the harder it can be to convince people that it's
worth having. ("Get a horse!" was considered a witty poke at
automobile-drivers not so long ago, historically speaking.)
If you want to effectively market something, don't do it
karaoke-bar-style. Hire somebody who knows what the heck they're doing.
--Erich Schwarz / schwarze...@starbase1.caltech.edu
Dave Griffith
> gcf:
> My admittedly amateur studies of animals which, though
> amateur, have been close and lengthy, have convinced me
> that the very degree to which humans are "psychotic" or
> "psychopathic", that is, depart from the habits which order
> the lives of other mammals, gives hope as well as fear. If
> greed, sadism, and violence can run wild in humans because
> of excess brain capacity, that same excess brain capacity
> may be able to evolve a culture which will obviate or at
> least deflect these drives. If it does not, humans as we
> know them will simply eliminate themselves as a species, as
> they appear to have come close to doing in this century.
Sorry to say, but small-scale greed, sadism, and violence just aren't
that big of a problem. We can live with a pretty shocking amount
of street crime, war, revolution, familial violence, etc., without
causing the end of life on earth as we know it. Those activities
whichdo threaten the existence of the biosphere (multi-nuke warfare,
certain ecological practices), can and are being dealt with without
resorting to the complete banishing of violence and greed from human
events. As I've indicated, the coming post-industrialism will obviate
such species-threatening behaviour simply because very few human
activities, including warfare, will "right-size" at a level capable of
causing permanent eco-catastrophe.
Certainly violence has costs, but what worth doing does not?
We shall bear these costs as we always have, and slog on to our
destiny, bloodsoaked though it be.
>Or as Albert Einstein put it: "Formerly, man could not do
>as he desired. Now, he can do as he desires; and he must
>either change his desires, or perish."
Einstein was speaking in the aftershock of the birth of the atomic
age, and under a considerable burden of self-imposed guilt. What's
your excuse?
--
Dave Griffith, Information Resources, University of Chicago,
Biological Sciences Division da...@delphi.bsd.uchicago.edu
Welcome to The Net. Check your assumptions at the door.
Steve Gustafson
Roger Bryner quoth:
SG>What really is the goal of economic
>activity?
RB>It has no goal, what is your goal. Mine is FAIRNESS and FUNDIMENTAL
>EQAUALITY OF RULES.
If there is no goal, there is no basis for preferring one economic
system over another.
My goal is to diminish the amount of their lives that people have to
spend in service of an economy. Capitalism is a partly useful tool to
that end, but it is not the be-all and end-all of it.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Vivre? Les serviteurs feront cela pour nous.
Erich Schwarz
> steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com (Steve Gustafson):
> | SG> Here is the first and perhaps the most dubious assumption of all. Of
> | > course, some people's ideas really do have more legitimacy than others.
This is controversial? Does anybody really propose the "null
hypothesis" that *everybody's ideas are all equally legitimate*?
I think the real issue is...how on earth do we know who at any given
moment has got his/her hand on the *important* part of the elephant?
There's no serious debate that there's an elephant out there called
Reality; also no serious debate among thoughtful people that we're all
blind men, forced to observe the elephant by touching small parts. Which
part is crucial at a given instant? Not so trivial to settle.
> | > It may be expected of us now to pretend otherwise at many times, but
> | > nobody really acts that way.
Oh, I disagree. The L.A. public school system has operated on that
premise for at least 20 years, and it's vigorously lobotomizing its
students....grrr...
chip on shoulder...grr.... ;-)
> | > Let's forget make-believe egalitarianism. It is only a socially
> | > compelled untruth we are expected to pay lip service to.
>
> gcf:
> | > ... Just so, it is the rejection of kings and
> | >popes and holy writ that makes political progress possible
> | >-- indeed, almost any use of the mind whatever.
Right, but then we face the spectacle of the Yahoo who wants to be
taken as seriously as Stephen Hawking or Stephen Jay Gould, but who will
not sweat to acquire knowledge in the manner that these two individuals
have. Then we have public school textbooks decided upon by the State of
Texas, which is in turn cowed by the Gablers, both of whom really believe
that they know more about the workings of the universe than the two
scientists I mentioned. So we get, in the public schools, pabulum that
*won't* teach science with the honesty--and enjoyability--that either of
these two scientists have in fact shown in their own best-selling writings.
Sorry, Gordon, but I think Steve has at least a teensy weensy point
here. All human beings are *equal*, but we're not all *alike*; and we are
entitled to our own *informed* opinion, not our own random intellectual
belchings.
>
> sg:
> | The last hundred and fifty years of experimentation with popular,
> | unlimited democracy has to my mind proven itself to be the exact
> | opposite of progress. Under various aristocratic or "elitist" polities,
> | it is occasionally possible to find individuals with true courage and
> | moral worth elevated to power. Under populist democracies, they are
> | systematically excluded.
>
> So much the better. I would say that power is a sin, but I
> do not want to get into a theological argument, so I will
> say only that to me, it is a kind of crime. An individual
> with true courage and moral worth belongs -- is -- in
> opposition to it.
Wait a minute...wait a minute.
Steve: have you actually read the campaigns against Jefferson's
presidential bid in 1800? Or what people said about Lincoln while he was
still alive? We did elect some rather impressive people, but the "elitist"
electorate was willing to entertain public word-floggings that would be
considered gauche now, some of which had the present inhabitants of Mt.
Rushmore as their targets.
In general, people only appreciate "individuals with true courage" in
the White House after they're safely dead. Not even George Washington was
unanimously approved of--Thomas Paine thought he was a backstabber. I
should add that Paine was shabbily treated and had reason to be angry at
people, even if his particular animus against Washington was biased.
Gordon: do you really think that Lincoln was a moral wet rag? What
about FDR? I agree that it is often the sign of moral excellence to be
against the powers that be, but you seem to assume that being in power is
some sort of latter-day Sin Against the Holy Ghost.
There's something a bit, well, childish about an ethos that states
baldly "power is a kind of crime." There are a lot of things worse than
having leaders who care about doing their job with excellence. We may get
a very strong demonstration of that point in the immediate future--indeed,
in my view, the last 12 years have already been such a demonstration.
>
> sg:
> | Whatever you might say against the Churches of Rome or Lenin --- and I
> | admit, there is a great deal to be said against both --- they
> | represented unifying doctrines that at least masked petty hatreds, and
> | an intellectual tradition that could generate subtlety, if not truth.
> | When the hand of authority they represented was partly withdrawn,
> | hundreds of petty feuds were unleashed, and the resulting bloodbaths may
> | yet be the equal of the ones the institutions themselves sponsored.
Oh, go read Milton's _Areopagitica_. I won't even try to summarize it,
just go read it. Or if that's too austere and 17th-century, try John
Stuart Mill's _On Liberty_--eminently readable. If you think you can
refute either of their arguments against your position on "Churches bring
stability", then we'll talk.
>
> They will probably be exactly the equal, because those
> institutions did not mask but organized the evil they
> covered. Removing the covering is a positive step toward
> cleaning up what is underneath. We should not be surprised
> that it is foul; as above, so below.
Actually, I agree. Heh.
> sg:
> | ... I think it is a hard truth for those reared
> | in conventional democratic pieties to face, but it is nonetheless true:
> | the preservation of liberty and intellectual values requires that the
> | common people be occasionally restrained by their superiors.
Oh, I see. And do you have any candidates for "superior" in mind? Let
me make three guesses...
> I am neither pious nor a democrat. I see in democracy a
> kind of provisional defense against certain kinds of
> political psychopathy, which has often worked, far better
> at least than other schemes. It is the "superiors",
> manifestly, who need restraining by the common people, and
> not the other way around. The wickedness of a George Bush
> is not often found in bus drivers; if a bus driver walked
> into a city and killed thousands of people in order to keep
> her job, we would find her a remarkable bus driver indeed.
It is both the superiors and the common people who, in a healthy
society (IMHO) need to "restrain" each other. *Neither* is sufficient.
The reason why bus drivers in the United States do not usually have to
engage in mayhem to do their job is: we are relatively rich and secure
compared to most of the rest of the present world and most of human
history.
We have the land and material resources to be that way because we
fought and killed for them. We have a strong central government because
Mr. Lincoln fought an incredibly bloody war to preserve it. We are not
marching the German goosestep today because FDR decided to take out
Germany/Japan before they got around to assimilating us. For the bus
driver to flaunt her pacifistic moral superiority is just posturing.
The real moral world is, unfortunately, multi-variate, complicated, and
messy.
--Erich Schwarz / schwarze...@starbase1.caltech.edu
Parker Whittle
: In article <1244.15...@tfd.coplex.com> steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com (Steve Gustafson) writes:
: >
: >Their purpose is to convince that portion of the population that is
: >susceptible to being so misled, that some difference exists between a
: >Brand A molecule of aspirin and a Brand X molecule of aspirin, so as to
: >justify charging them a higher price for Brand A, in hopes the poor
: >dupes will be satisfied with its entirely illusory superiority.
A fundamental aspect of liberty is that no matter how convinced you are
of some truth, no matter how convincing the evidence, you might actually
be quite wrong. The obvious can always be deceptive. It is this natural
fallibility of humans that leads us to value individual liberty. The
reason we should tolerate behavior we find distasteful is less a matter
of the trade-offs involved in liberty, but the willingness to admit that
others have a different point of view and that theirs might actually be
correct. Some people might actually believe that two different chemically
identical substances are quite different -- and given that we still do
not understand everything there is to know about physical chemistry, they
might be right. The lesson of Galileo should be a constant reminder that
Government should not be the arbiter of Truth.
It is the possibility that opposing viewpoints might be correct that
necessitates tolerance toward them -- no matter how distasteful -- as
long as they aren't actually fraudulent.
: > This
: >unearned excess also keeps the flacks in business. It may be that some
: >abstract notion of liberty requires us to endure this. It is much less
: >clear in my mind that this sort of puffery improves the efficiency of
: >the provision of goods and services, or adds value to the products whose
: >prices are inflated by these devices.
There is no instrinsic value of a thing. Value is subjective, as is the
decision to buy anything. If you believe that there is no difference at
all between brand X and brand Y, then you have every right to persuade
others to your point of view -- but the ever-present possibility that you
might be wrong precludes the use of force.
--Doktor Meltdown
Zev Sero
>One piece of evidence that consumers are aware of this is that although
>many adults buy generic aspirin for themselves, they are much less likely
>to buy generic CHILDREN'S aspirin for their kids.
I should bloody well hope not! Nor should they be buying them name-brand
aspirin.
> Parents won't take as
>many chances with their children's health as they will with their own;
If USans still give aspirin to children then they are taking big
chances with their health.
--
Zev Sero z...@asis.unimelb.edu.au I'm back!!!!
Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply
because we prefix to them the two other words `God can'...nonsense remains
nonsense, even when we talk it about God. C.S.Lewis `The Problem of Pain'
Steve Gustafson
Gordon Fitch quoth:
SG>Helas, culture cannot "deal with human propensities toward violence,
>sadism, greed, and destruction." Our instincts of intra-species
>aggression, social hierarchies and "pecking orders," group loyalties and
>suspicion of strangers, territorialism, and sex role differentiation are
>with us always.
GF>My admittedly amateur studies of animals which, though
>amateur, have been close and lengthy, have convinced me
>that the very degree to which humans are "psychotic" or
>"psychopathic", that is, depart from the habits which order
>the lives of other mammals, gives hope as well as fear.
I would question the degree that human behaviour does in fact depart
from the habits which order the lives of other mammals. You might want
to look up Franz de Waal's "Chimpanzee Politics" for a look at how
similar the social lives of humans are to those of our first cousins.
Go down to the local misdemeanour court, the place where they hold daily
or weekly sessions of gaol-delivery. Watch the drunks and wife-beaters
and petty thieves come forth to plead their cases and be processed by
the system of justice. You will rapidly be impressed by the
predictability of human behaviour in the aggregate.
GF>Or as Albert Einstein put it: "Formerly, man could not do
>as he desired. Now, he can do as he desires; and he must
>either change his desires, or perish."
Just so; so it's more the pity that our desires are coded in ROM.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Freedom and whisky gang thegither!
Steve Gustafson
Gordon Fitch quoth:
SG>Under various aristocratic or "elitist" polities,
>it is occasionally possible to find individuals with true courage and
>moral worth elevated to power. Under populist democracies, they are
>systematically excluded.
GF>So much the better. I would say that power is a sin, but I
>do not want to get into a theological argument, so I will
>say only that to me, it is a kind of crime. An individual
>with true courage and moral worth belongs -- is -- in
>opposition to it.
The gods know, this posture is common enough, though it is rarely so
clearly expressed as you have here. And having clearly expressed it, we
can see its bizarre and paradoxical nature. To adopt this pose is to
become like the fellow who named his political creed Anti-ism: "Whatever
it is, I'm agin' it!"
Most reformers and revolutionaries have not held that power is a sin;
only that it is when held by their opponents, whom they want to replace.
Whether you see this in Freudian, Oedipal images; or through de Waal's
imagery of primate ethology, the eternal struggle of the alpha male to
maintain his dominance, and the lower ranking males to remove and
replace him, it does seem an endless cycle.
For this is not at roots a political, but an aesthetic creed. Its
origin is in no vision for human governance, but in the need for
constant change felt in the world of fashion, as manifested in the
monotonous rituals of bohemian avant-gardism. I strongly suspect that
if you trace the roots of this belief, you will find its origin in
circles who believed strongly in bohemian avant-gardism as a cultural
imperative.
Being central to their cultural identity, it expanded into a moral,
theological, and political postulate as well. To believe that whoever
currently holds the most power and prestige is the villain, no matter
who she happens to be, makes little sense as a paradigm for the smooth
governance of society. It makes perfect sense if your goal is to be an
aesthetic dandy or a beatnik who wants to foretaste every trend a few
months before the hoi polloi learn about it.
Don't misunderstand me --- there is a lot to be said in favour of this
kind of cultivated taste. It represents a stance in favour not only of
innovation, but also of intellectual subtlety, a delight in distancing
oneself from the common herd, and many other praiseworthy qualities.
But surely we can all see that this stance is profoundly hostile to the
conventional pieties of democracy. And, despite the occasional protests
of the believers, it has little real contact with the cult of the
"proletarian," the "masses," or the "common man." (Believers would
probably say that they are rejecting the "bourgeois." In the USA,
there's hardly a difference; our working classes are indeed "bourgeois,"
at least as defined by culture, if not economic theory; and
"proletarians" are only mythical beasts whose necks are thicker than
their heads.) They just can't see that they aren't really "democrats,"
and that their rhetorical solidarity with the "masses" contains large
doses of both hypocrisy and self-delusion.
I would suggest that you don't -exactly- mean that power is a "sin,"
although perhaps many sins do have an aesthetic component. Far less is
it a "crime," except perhaps in a similar sense of aesthetic metaphor.
But both those words are colloquially used to describe that which is -in
poor taste-, boring, dull, outmoded, "bourgeois," all been done before.
Just like ordinary life itself.
GF>It is the "superiors",
>manifestly, who need restraining by the common people, and
>not the other way around. The wickedness of a George Bush
>is not often found in bus drivers; if a bus driver walked
>into a city and killed thousands of people in order to keep
>her job, we would find her a remarkable bus driver indeed.
The wickedness of a George Bush is mirrored exactly by the wickedness of
the rabble who swept him into power. They did not do so innocently, or
without malice aforethought. George Bush -told- them that he was
worthier of the post -exactly- because he claimed to be more capable of
wreaking that kind of mass destruction than the other guy. He told us
all exactly that, in no uncertain terms. His image makers and spin
doctors went out of their way to portray his chief opponent as a
weakling and moral imbecile for just those reasons. No one ---
especially not an erstwhile defender of mass democracy --- should be
outraged when Bush, once enthroned, went around and did pretty much what
he promised to do.
Whatever their other failings, the aesthetic minority who pride
themselves on keeping a step ahead of the masses of humanity would not
have been fooled by such pretenses. In Bush/Quayle's case, they
certainly were not; and hence Bush/Quayle's populist and very
democratic-minded carping about a "cultural elite" who pretends to be
smarter than the salt of the earth who voted for them.
Assuming your distaste for Bush/Quayle, then:
Would we not be better governed, in at least that instance, by a
"cultural elite" than we were by the "Masses?"
And if so, how do you reconcile this with your affection for democracy?
---
. OLX 2.2 . Democracy is the cruelest form of tyranny - Socrates.
Robert Vienneau
lots of unqualified debatable points and half-truths. In fact, some of these
are so blatantly distorted that I wonder about the intellectual honesty of
Chris' sources. It seems they must be nearer polemical propaganda than
serious scholarship.
Before I get to details, let me point out that Chris missed addressing
my major technical point. Long period equilibrium prices can either
equilibrate Supply and Demand ultimately reflecting given preferences,
or they can bring the rate of profit to equality in all lines of
production in use. They cannot do both. All of the technical
details below are at best tangentially related to this mathematical
fact.
> ... Robert....@launchpad.unc.edu (Robert Vienneau) writes:
>>>>The classical economists _failed_ to create a useful explanation of
>>>>value, whereas the neoclassical economists did not.
>>This is exactly backwards...
>[ Outline of Sraffian/Marxist PCMC deleted. ]
^^^1^^^
1. This is good for bogeyman purposes, and Sraffa may himself never
have strayed far from Marx. But, in fact, there is a large body
of literature arguing about the relationship of Sraffianism to
Marx and Marxism (and the relationship of both to Classical
economics). Those orthodox Marxists who use the label "Neoricardian"
do not intend it as a compliment. More on this anon.
>Mr. Vienneau neglects to mention that constant returns to scale
^^^^^^^^^^2^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>and no substitution of inputs have been smuggled surreptiously into
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^3^^^^^^^^
>the model he discussed...
2. In the first two (of three) parts of Sraffa's book he takes the
level and composition of output as given. Thus, no question of a
functional relationship between inputs and the scale of output can
arise. The problem Neoclassicals have with this model (including Frank
Hahn) is they do not understand the role of prices here. Prices
ensure that the system can reproduce itself, not that profit is
maximized. The misunderstanding starts at chapter I.
Now if one wants to justify these prices on the basis of profit
maximiziation, that is as a Neoclassical model, one must introduce
constant returns, as far as I know. But the mainstream Neo-Walrasian
General Equilibrium models require the same assumption. At least
I'm not convinced it can be relaxed.
3. I'm not sure what Chris means by "substitution." In the last part
of Sraffa's book he allows for choice among an indefinitely large
number of fixed coefficient techniques for producing each good.
And the more general model allows for land-like resources and fixed
capital. None of these complications have anything to do with my
main point above. What they do do is show the naive intuition
that a comparison among long-run equilibrium positions producing
the same time composition of consumption goods will have a higher
price of an input associated with a switch to techniques using it
less intensively. This is also destructive of Supply and Demand,
especially for an explanation of factor prices.
But my main point can be proven in a model that allows for continuous
microeconomic production functions, i.e. "continuous substitution,"
in all industries.
>...This model is influential amongst radical and
^^^^^^^^^^^
>post-Keynesian economists eager to preserve a labour theory of value
^^^^^^^^4^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^5^^^^^^^^^^
>(he is wrong to claim that such theorists have ``little use'' for the
>LTV, while Sraffa's theory is different from Marx's, equilibrium value
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>*is* simply dated labour in Sraffa's account), but largely ignored by the
^^^^^^^^^5 (cont.)^^^^^^
>majority of the economic community.
4. More debatable labeling. I think Post-Keynesians should connect their
theories to Sraffa, but many disagree (starting with Joan Robinson).
I know little about "radical economics," other than that it's something
else and that one prominent representative always argues against me
when I post advocating Sraffianism in sci.econ. I've also heard that
one of my favorite Sraffians wonders why radical economists in America
have not made more of Sraffa.
5. Dated labor refers to the simple mathematical fact that in the part I
model prices are the sum of a time stream of labor inputs valued at
the wage and discounted with the proper use of the rate of profits.
These are not labor values, and this is not the LTV. In fact, Sraffa's
model makes a good standpoint for attacking the LTV, as Paul Samuelson (!)
and Ian Steedman well-know. If Chris disagrees, and by the way this simple
relationship gets more complicated in the more general Sraffian model,
I'd like to know what he thinks Malthus and Ricardo were debating as
regards to value theory, or why Bohm-Bawerk was not advocating the LTV.
(Some Sraffians do think labor values can be salvaged as a theory of
exploitation while discarding the LTV.)
>>(For more about the collapse of Neoclassical theory, see
>>"Sraffa, Piero" and related entries in _The_New_Palgrave_.)
>
>The ``collapse of Neoclassical theory'' !?!
>
>Mr. Vienneau is surely pulling our collective leg here. Whether he
>likes it or not, neoclassical economics is the dominant paradigm in
^^^^^^^^^^6^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^...
>modern economics, has been for a long time, and shows no sign of
>losing ground to any competing theories...
6. I never said neoclassicalism was not dominant or the majority view.
But it doesn't take much to identify a feeling of unease with it.
The last quarter century has seen some very important mainstream
theorists questioning it, e.g. Frank Hahn, Wassily Leontief, and
Robert Clower. Furthermore, the body of dissenters has indeed grown.
For example, the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics and the
Cambridge Journal of Economics were only founded in the 1970s.
What's dominant depends where you are. The view would look very
different from Cambridge, England or Italy. It's been said that
the Sraffians are few, but they command the heights. E.g. the
editors of The New Palgrave, a standard reference are Sraffians,
and the economics there presents the theories I'm interested in
on a par with Neoclassicalism.
>...In particular, the Sraffian
>attack he claims ``collapses'' the neoclassical system dates to 1926,
^^^^7^^^^^^^^
>and, as I've mentioned, has few adherents...
7. It is true that Sraffa published an important paper in 1926 that
looking back we can see as the beginnings of the ideas in his book.
It is also true that he began writing his book about that time.
But at the time, that paper was seen as advocating the development
of a theory of imperfect competition. Furthermore, even his colleagues
at Cambridge were not fully apprised of his drafts until its publication
in 1960. One can begin to see his influence on Joan Robinson in the
fifties.
I challenge Chris to find any public recognition before 1983
of my main point following from Sraffa's model. Joan Robinson's
exposition, I think, was independent.
>...I'm afraid if this is
>his support for his contention that classical theories of value are
>``of increasing importance to modern economists,'' he ought to think
>again.
>
>--
>Chris Auld
>Department of Economics
>Queen's University at Kingston
>au...@econ01.econ.queensu.ca
I don't think I will answer any of Chris' posts if he canot do better.
Clarifying the amount of confusion above in so short a post is tiring.
Of course, to even be this confused, he's doing better than average.
I've known some with professional training in economics to have
never even heard of my favorite theories.
Steve Gustafson
Erich Schwarz quoth:
SG> Here is the first and perhaps the most dubious assumption of all. Of
> course, some people's ideas really do have more legitimacy than others.
ES>This is controversial? Does anybody really propose the "null
>hypothesis" that *everybody's ideas are all equally legitimate*?
Yes, because . . .
ES>Then we have public school textbooks decided upon by the State of
>Texas, which is in turn cowed by the Gablers, both of whom really believe
>that they know more about the workings of the universe than the two
>scientists I mentioned.
Democratic populists like the Gablers believe that all ideas are equal.
Whose ideas about the origin of the universe are right? Stephen
Hawking's, or Rev. Oarbus Beauregard "Jimbo" Pettymind of the Holiness
Church of the Foursquare Trinity with Signs Following?
The Gablers say: let's take a vote on it. Let's teach them both as
facts, and let the People decide.
---
Gordon Fitch
| SG>Under various aristocratic or "elitist" polities,
| >it is occasionally possible to find individuals with true courage and
| >moral worth elevated to power. Under populist democracies, they are
| >systematically excluded.
gcf:
| GF>So much the better. I would say that power is a sin, but I
| >do not want to get into a theological argument, so I will
| >say only that to me, it is a kind of crime. An individual
| >with true courage and moral worth belongs -- is -- in
| >opposition to it.
sg:
| The gods know, this posture is common enough, though it is rarely so
| clearly expressed as you have here. And having clearly expressed it, we
| can see its bizarre and paradoxical nature. To adopt this pose is to
| become like the fellow who named his political creed Anti-ism: "Whatever
| it is, I'm agin' it!"
Only if you take the domination of one person by another to
be a given, universal, inevitable. I don't and won't.
sg:
| Most reformers and revolutionaries have not held that power is a sin;
| only that it is when held by their opponents, whom they want to replace.
Which is why so many reforms fail; they replace one hand on
the whip with another, but the whip goes on.
| Whether you see this in Freudian, Oedipal images; or through de Waal's
| imagery of primate ethology, the eternal struggle of the alpha male to
| maintain his dominance, and the lower ranking males to remove and
| replace him, it does seem an endless cycle.
I thought the use of ethology to imply such things about
human nature had worn too thin to be used in this way any
more. Yes, baboons organize themselves in certain ways
which are reminiscent of some human behavior. But, as I
said before, humans do much worse things than baboons, so we
can also hope that they may be able to better things.
"Better" and "worse" by me, of course. Evidently some
people have a different spectrum of values.
sg:
| For this is not at roots a political, but an aesthetic creed. Its
| origin is in no vision for human governance, but in the need for
| constant change felt in the world of fashion, as manifested in the
| monotonous rituals of bohemian avant-gardism. I strongly suspect that
| if you trace the roots of this belief, you will find its origin in
| circles who believed strongly in bohemian avant-gardism as a cultural
| imperative.
Well, if you consider (for example) the English religious
radicals of the 17th century to be avant-gardist bohemians,
then I suppose you could say this. It seems supererogatory
to impose a 19th-century style on them, but as you wish. I
feel no need for governance, and am willing to forego its
exercise upon others, as long as they come and go in peace;
if this makes me an avant-garde bohemian, so be it; there
are worse things to be. Overpowering others, not the
refusal to, is the positive and questionable act, and it
seems to me it is that which should be questioned. I am not
sure where "fashion" comes in here. Fashion is a mode of
social communication which is practiced as much by the
devotes of power as anyone else. Aesthetics is one of the
fragments of consciousness which remains to humans after
many generations of giving up their minds to authority and
mechanism, springing up like an ailanthus tree in a vacant
lot full of rubble.
The bohemian lifestyle, however, is culturally, maybe
politically interesting. I suppose it became necessary to
artists and radicals in the 19th century as liberalism and
its Calvinistic undertow took hold. It is not possible to
make interesting art through the determined, compulsive
procedures characteristic of industrialism, hence artists,
many of them upper- or lower-middle-class, split from the
bourgeoisie and entered into a love-hate relationship with
it, at once defying it, serving it, and living off it;
first _epater_, then _vendre_.
Now, an interesting thing happened in the middle of the
1960s: encouraged by the highest general standard of living
to have ever existed, a number of mostly young, mostly
middle-class people engaged in a cultural jailbreak of
sorts, and they _appeared_ as well to be engaging in a
"bohemian lifestyle." But unlike the traditional bohemians,
they had nothing to sell to the bourgeoisie; in fact, they
wished to _convert_ the bourgeoisie, as well as everyone
else. Therefore, some social critics complained that they
weren't "real bohemians" and that they had, in fact, killed
the bohemian scene. But these critics were apparently
unaware that the hippies were harkening back to an earlier
anarchist style that has gone under many other names, for
instance, to the said religious radicals.
All this may seem like a bit of quibbling over names, but I
think there is an important disinction between the bohemian
style, as usually defined, and my condemnation of authority.
The former was a strategy to deal with liberal bourgeois
capitalism on a personal basis without being swallowed up in
it, nor yet starving; the latter has a much longer and wider
history, and much greater ambitions.
sg:
| ...
| But surely we can all see that this stance is profoundly hostile to the
| conventional pieties of democracy. And, despite the occasional protests
| of the believers, it has little real contact with the cult of the
| "proletarian," the "masses," or the "common man." (Believers would
| probably say that they are rejecting the "bourgeois." In the USA,
| there's hardly a difference; our working classes are indeed "bourgeois,"
| at least as defined by culture, if not economic theory; and
| "proletarians" are only mythical beasts whose necks are thicker than
| their heads.) They just can't see that they aren't really "democrats,"
| and that their rhetorical solidarity with the "masses" contains large
| doses of both hypocrisy and self-delusion.
I think here you're talking to imagined persons. Classical
liberals and anarchists, at least, do not particularly
revere or wax affectionate about democracy or the
proletariat; they are suspicious of all forms of power. As
I said before, democracy was originally thought to be an
expedient, a defense against misrule, a necessary evil like
government itself. It became a reason to slaughter people
because slaughter needed a reason, not because democracy
needed slaughter. But the word was at hand and (at the
time) relatively unbesmirched.
sg:
| I would suggest that you don't -exactly- mean that power is a "sin,"
| although perhaps many sins do have an aesthetic component. Far less is
| it a "crime," except perhaps in a similar sense of aesthetic metaphor.
| But both those words are colloquially used to describe that which is -in
| poor taste-, boring, dull, outmoded, "bourgeois," all been done before.
| Just like ordinary life itself.
Heh. Whose life is "ordinary"? Why is it dull, boring,
outmoded, "bourgeois", done before?
Gordon Fitch
steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com (Steve Gustafson):
| > | SG> Here is the first and perhaps the most dubious assumption of all. Of
| > | > course, some people's ideas really do have more legitimacy than others.
schw...@starbase1.caltech.edu (Erich Schwarz) writes:
| This is controversial? Does anybody really propose the "null
| hypothesis" that *everybody's ideas are all equally legitimate*?
I mean something different from "valid" or "good" when I say
"legitimate." "Legitimate" means (by me) something like
"according to the rules." The pope (say) makes up a rule
whereby the pope's ideas about certain things are better
than mine, not because their validity is tested against
phenomena or reason, but because they come from the said
pope. But I refuse to adhere to these rules. I can make up
a similar but contrary set of rules, or I can deny that
rules of this sort have validity until shown to have
validity. Now it's the pope's rule against mine; I need not
tell you which I prefer.
Historically, conflicts like these have been solved by means
of force. But if the pope cannot shoot me, or I him, then
we have two equally "legitimate" systems of ideas.
es:
| I think the real issue is...how on earth do we know who at any given
| moment has got his/her hand on the *important* part of the elephant?
| There's no serious debate that there's an elephant out there called
| Reality; also no serious debate among thoughtful people that we're all
| blind men, forced to observe the elephant by touching small parts. Which
| part is crucial at a given instant? Not so trivial to settle.
Exactly. For certain material phenomena, we can practice
science; otherwise we can argue and persuade, or agree to
disagree, or (like so many of the faithful) resort to
violence.
| ...
gcf:
| > | > ... Just so, it is the rejection of kings and
| > | >popes and holy writ that makes political progress possible
| > | >-- indeed, almost any use of the mind whatever.
es:
| Right, but then we face the spectacle of the Yahoo who wants to be
| taken as seriously as Stephen Hawking or Stephen Jay Gould, but who will
| not sweat to acquire knowledge in the manner that these two individuals
| have.
In my experience, the average Yahoo want to be taken as
not Hawking or Gould, but as some bigger Yahoo. But this is
parenthetical.
es:
| Then we have public school textbooks decided upon by the State of
| Texas, which is in turn cowed by the Gablers, both of whom really believe
| that they know more about the workings of the universe than the two
| scientists I mentioned. So we get, in the public schools, pabulum that
| *won't* teach science with the honesty--and enjoyability--that either of
| these two scientists have in fact shown in their own best-selling writings.
| Sorry, Gordon, but I think Steve has at least a teensy weensy point
| here. All human beings are *equal*, but we're not all *alike*; and we are
| entitled to our own *informed* opinion, not our own random intellectual
| belchings.
We're entitled to any opinion we like. We're not entitled
to impose that opinion on others because of who we say we
are. That's my point.
sg:
| > | The last hundred and fifty years of experimentation with popular,
| > | unlimited democracy has to my mind proven itself to be the exact
| > | opposite of progress. Under various aristocratic or "elitist" polities,
| > | it is occasionally possible to find individuals with true courage and
| > | moral worth elevated to power. Under populist democracies, they are
| > | systematically excluded.
gcf:
| > So much the better. I would say that power is a sin, but I
| > do not want to get into a theological argument, so I will
| > say only that to me, it is a kind of crime. An individual
| > with true courage and moral worth belongs -- is -- in
| > opposition to it.
es:
| Gordon: do you really think that Lincoln was a moral wet rag? What
| about FDR? I agree that it is often the sign of moral excellence to be
| against the powers that be, but you seem to assume that being in power is
| some sort of latter-day Sin Against the Holy Ghost.
| There's something a bit, well, childish about an ethos that states
| baldly "power is a kind of crime." There are a lot of things worse than
| having leaders who care about doing their job with excellence. We may get
| a very strong demonstration of that point in the immediate future--indeed,
| in my view, the last 12 years have already been such a demonstration.
Well, I'm not going to sit here and judge Lincoln and FDR,
or Washington or Jefferson, as persons; no doubt they did as
well as they could. I can criticize only their politics,
and only with reference to what I can do in my world. It
may be, for example, that FDR forestalled a savage civil war
between fascists and socialists by revamping American
capitalism; if so, then he saved many lives and prevented
great suffering, but it does not mean that the revamped
capitalism is above criticism or is the last word in social
arrangements. What most people in big-ticket politics
assume all the way back at the beginning of their careers is
that domination is inevitable, so they might as well do it
as well as possible. I don't know if this makes them moral
wet rags or not, but it's not my morality.
es:
| ... For the bus
| driver to flaunt her pacifistic moral superiority is just posturing.
Yes, this is the burden of pacifistic bus drivers, but if
they want to be moral, they must carry it.
Erich Schwarz
(Steve Gustafson) wrote:
> Democratic populists like the Gablers believe that all ideas are equal.
> Whose ideas about the origin of the universe are right? Stephen
> Hawking's, or Rev. Oarbus Beauregard "Jimbo" Pettymind of the Holiness
> Church of the Foursquare Trinity with Signs Following?
Right, but the more subtle problem--which I think Gordon Fitch sees,
but that maybe you don't--is that *all* of us are Gablers at least
sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes. If we're Dictator-for-Life,
who'll tell us?
The strength of democracy is not the vast intelligence of the common
people, but that their collective dislikes and distrusts are more steady
and sustainable than the brilliant errors of self-appointed superior men.
The weakness of democracy is that eventually the common people start
picking leaders who don't in any way threaten their mediocrity. The only
reason why I feel more hopeful about the U.S. than not is that, despite the
open path to self-destruction thus in front of America, it's outlived a lot
of aristocratic states. Empirically, American mob-ocracy doesn't seem to
have done as badly as its illiberal critics might reasonably predict.
--Erich Schwarz / schwarze...@starbase1.caltech.edu
Erich Schwarz
> [Erich Schwarz]:
> | Then we have public school textbooks decided upon by the State of
> | Texas, which is in turn cowed by the Gablers, both of whom really believe
> | that they know more about the workings of the universe than the two
> | scientists I mentioned. So we get, in the public schools, pabulum that
> | *won't* teach science with the honesty--and enjoyability--that either of
> | these two scientists have in fact shown in their own best-selling writings.
> | Sorry, Gordon, but I think Steve has at least a teensy weensy point
> | here. All human beings are *equal*, but we're not all *alike*; and we are
> | entitled to our own *informed* opinion, not our own random intellectual
> | belchings.
>
> We're entitled to any opinion we like. We're not entitled
> to impose that opinion on others because of who we say we
> are. That's my point.
But we must either: (1) not educate children, or educate them through
some version of (2) public schooling, (3) voucher-supported schools, or (4)
purely private schools.
I assume that you're in favor of option (2), not options (1) or
(3)-(4).
So whose physics is going to get taught in the non-voucher public
schools? Hawking's or the Gablers'? They exclude one another logically.
Are we going to teach *neither*? (Heh. In practice, in the inner-city
L.A. public school system, we do indeed teach neither! now *that's*
democracy in action.)
Sorry, but once you're in favor of teaching kids physics in public
schools, you must CHOOSE. You can choose to not teach *any* physics so
that nobody's sensitivities are injured. But that's still a choice.
> What most people in big-ticket politics
> assume all the way back at the beginning of their careers is
> that domination is inevitable, so they might as well do it
> as well as possible. I don't know if this makes them moral
> wet rags or not, but it's not my morality.
Fair enough.
I like non-violent people. I like being in a society that has the
delicacy to respect such people. But I believe that they can only
permanently exist in a society defended by violent people. At the same
time, I think that there are both responsible/good and irresponsible/evil
ways to be a violent person; and that a worthwhile society can only be
effectively defended over a long period of time by violent people of the
first type.
>
> es:
> | ... For the bus
> | driver to flaunt her pacifistic moral superiority is just posturing.
>
> Yes, this is the burden of pacifistic bus drivers, but if
> they want to be moral, they must carry it.
If they want to be moral by the criteria of pacifism *and* honest with
themselves, yes.
--Erich Schwarz / schwarze...@starbase1.caltech.edu
Gordon Fitch
|> | Then we have public school textbooks decided upon by the State of
|> | Texas, which is in turn cowed by the Gablers, both of whom really believe
|> | that they know more about the workings of the universe than the two
|> | scientists I mentioned. So we get, in the public schools, pabulum that
|> | *won't* teach science with the honesty--and enjoyability--that either of
|> | these two scientists have in fact shown in their own best-selling writings.
|> | Sorry, Gordon, but I think Steve has at least a teensy weensy point
|> | here. All human beings are *equal*, but we're not all *alike*; and we are
|> | entitled to our own *informed* opinion, not our own random intellectual
|> | belchings.
gcf:
| > We're entitled to any opinion we like. We're not entitled
| > to impose that opinion on others because of who we say we
| > are. That's my point.
es:
| But we must either: (1) not educate children, or educate them through
| some version of (2) public schooling, (3) voucher-supported schools, or (4)
| purely private schools.
| I assume that you're in favor of option (2), not options (1) or
| (3)-(4).
| So whose physics is going to get taught in the non-voucher public
| schools? Hawking's or the Gablers'? They exclude one another logically.
| Are we going to teach *neither*? (Heh. In practice, in the inner-city
| L.A. public school system, we do indeed teach neither! now *that's*
| democracy in action.)
| Sorry, but once you're in favor of teaching kids physics in public
| schools, you must CHOOSE. You can choose to not teach *any* physics so
| that nobody's sensitivities are injured. But that's still a choice.
Well, actually we _don't_ have to educate people, but I'm
not going to go utopian here because it will make the
article too long. Instead, let's assume that we're going to
keep on with liberal bourgeois capitalism long enough to
answer the question. Then we do have to educate people,
that is, bring their intellects into conformity with the
needs and desires of the ruling or managing class, but
without becoming too illiberal about it. We need liberal
arts for the managers, science and technology for their more
favored servitors, and the three Rs and some vocational
stuff for everyone else. We don't force people into these
roles directly; instead, we reward those who conform to
their roles and punish those who don't. The immediate
rewards and punishments are economic, but as anyone but a
naive libertarian knows the economic becomes political
pretty quickly, as when you can't pay the rent in San
Francisco and subsequently come under the purview of its
vicious "Matrix" program.
Now, there come Hawking and the Gablers, neither of whom are
yet homeless, and so the bourgeoisie have to listen to both
(because they, the bourgeoisie, are liberal). There is an
approach which may encompass both, and it is
quintessentially liberal, resting on one of Jefferson's more
hallowed utterances: "All the Truth needs, and all it
wants, is the Liberty of appearing." That is, when it comes
to science, and when the laws of physics (say) are disputed,
the bourgeoisie can say through the mouth of the school,
"People disagree about these laws of physics. Here are the
arguments. Here is a method by which you can distiguish
between the arguments and test their validity; it is called
the 'scientific method.'" It is far more effective to suck
people like the Gablers into the maw of the scientific
method than to suppress them by force.
Of course, even the "scientific method" can be challenged,
although few do it in the realm of the hard sciences. After
all, if you can turn a whole city full of people to dust and
vapor in the twinkling of an eye, you're going to get
_repute_ if nothing else. But in that case, the scientific
method can simply be presented side by side with whatever
other method is being pushed; Mr. Jefferson's princple ought
to work as well. I don't think this latter problem will
arise, however; I notice that creationists have almost
entirely consented to argue within the universe of the
scientific method. I guess they are doomed romantics.
I'm assuming here, of course, that liberals remain in
control of the system. Where authoritarians get power, they
will not practice liberalism and Jefferson's dictum will not
apply. However, if the people have generally been taught to
doubt that might makes right, which is all "authority" means
anyway, there will be a substratum of resistance and
disbelief which will weaken the authorities and may someday
come to the surface again, as we have seen in recent years
in eastern Europe.
(The problem of the Los Angeles school system, as well as
many others, is not so much a question of what to teach, but
whether to teach at all. I believe this stems from the same
loss of bourgeois morale evident in the decline of (modern)
liberalism, which seems to have started with the Kennedy
regime and its War in Vietnam.)
| ...
gcf:
| > What most people in big-ticket politics
| > assume all the way back at the beginning of their careers is
| > that domination is inevitable, so they might as well do it
| > as well as possible. I don't know if this makes them moral
| > wet rags or not, but it's not my morality.
es:
| Fair enough.
| I like non-violent people. I like being in a society that has the
| delicacy to respect such people. But I believe that they can only
| permanently exist in a society defended by violent people. At the same
| time, I think that there are both responsible/good and irresponsible/evil
| ways to be a violent person; and that a worthwhile society can only be
| effectively defended over a long period of time by violent people of the
| first type.
I didn't say non-violent. There are many creatures who mind
their business if allowed to, but who, if attacked, may
defend themselves violently, and attempt to drive off their
attackers. Some pacifists allow for this sort of violence
in their theories, others don't. I think the problem arises
when one _plans_ violence and promulgates the plan, thus
creating a state. But now we are getting away from the
subject of the thread and into anarchist theory, which is
not yet TRVTH.
Roger Bryner
>I'm assuming here, of course, that liberals remain in
>control of the system. Where authoritarians get power, they
>will not practice liberalism and Jefferson's dictum will not
>apply. However, if the people have generally been taught to
>doubt that might makes right, which is all "authority" means
>anyway, there will be a substratum of resistance and
>disbelief which will weaken the authorities and may someday
>come to the surface again, as we have seen in recent years
>in eastern Europe.
They did not have the advantage of information technology.
The reason that monolithic governments fail is the same as
the reason that republican governments fail. Coruption is
the key to alowing "crime" aginst non-individuals. Machines
can not be corupted. We realy need a distributed system.
I would say, personal data cards with *NO* government database,
and a seperate, unatached cards, with *NO* identity, as electronic
cash.
Roger, Mad Dog, Bryner.
Roger Bryner
> So whose physics is going to get taught in the non-voucher public
>schools? Hawking's or the Gablers'? They exclude one another logically.
So do ecludian, eleptic, and parabolic geomitry:-). Math can teach all
three. Why can't you grasp that knowledge does not exclude other
knowledge. You are not poisioned, just taught.
>Are we going to teach *neither*? (Heh. In practice, in the inner-city
>L.A. public school system, we do indeed teach neither! now *that's*
>democracy in action.)
> Sorry, but once you're in favor of teaching kids physics in public
>schools, you must CHOOSE. You can choose to not teach *any* physics so
>that nobody's sensitivities are injured. But that's still a choice.
How about leaving that choice to the student. This is the free market.
When you put the power in the hands of the few, they will do exactly what
was done in LA's schools, and others.
Roger, Mad Dog Libertarian, Bryner.
Russell Turpin
schw...@starbase1.caltech.edu (Erich Schwarz) writes:
>> So whose physics is going to get taught in the non-voucher public
>> schools? Hawking's or the Gablers'? They exclude one another
>> logically.
In article <bryner.829...@chemistry.utah.edu>, Roger Bryner <bry...@chemistry.utah.edu> wrote:
> So do ecludian, eleptic, and parabolic geomitry:-). ...
This is a faulty analogy. There is no more logical conflict
between Euclidean, spherical, and hyperbolic geometries (which
I assume are the ones Bryner intended) than there is between
linear and quadratic equations. The same math with the same
axioms encompasses all three geometries. Indeed, I can
construct a *single* smooth manifold that is locally Euclidean,
spherical, and hyperbolic in different portions.
The shift in mathematical thinking was *not* in thinking that
there were alternatives to Euclidean geometry that might be
true instead, but in realizing that Euclidean geometry did
not define geometric truth.
Russell
--
Galbraith's Law of Human Nature:
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is
no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.
Gordon Fitch
| ... Machines
| can not be corupted. ....
On the contrary, machines can be corrupted in the same way
as persons: by figuring out and supplying the proper (or I
should say, improper) inputs.
Roger Bryner
>This is a faulty analogy. There is no more logical conflict
>between Euclidean, spherical, and hyperbolic geometries (which
>I assume are the ones Bryner intended) than there is between
yes there is, unless you are a little bit smarter than a begining
student in geomitry. Would you like me post the axioms that conflict?
Well, I don't need to. There exists a construction of the three geomitries
that includes as a postulate that two parallel lines
1) must interscet.
2) will not interscet.
3) will diverge.
The three are not compatable. QED.
These are universal and not local statments.
(If you re-define the statment to be local, and not universal, you might
find the two to be equivilent, wow that sounds familiar)
>linear and quadratic equations. The same math with the same
>axioms encompasses all three geometries. Indeed, I can
>construct a *single* smooth manifold that is locally Euclidean,
>spherical, and hyperbolic in different portions.
In other words the question was answered subjectivly. See my post on
abortion.
When and if you have a subjective answer for the universe, you will not
to mandate that it be taught. Its streingth will win unless it is censored.
Roger, Mad Dog Libertarian, Bryner.
****************************************************************
Nothing that is forced is good.
Mike Huben
Glen Raphael <rap...@fx.com> wrote:
>steve.g...@tfd.coplex.com (Steve Gustafson) writes:
>>Anton Sherwood quoth:
>>SG>Because -in reality- aspirin molecules are perfectly fungible, their
>>>efforts allow Brand A to charge more for an identical product.
>
>>DAS>aren't there differences in purity and the fillers used?
>
>>I can't recall these differences ever being the themes of a painkiller
>>ad campaign --- and bear in mind the campaigns are designed by trained
>>professionals to be memorable.
>
>Irrelevant. The generics can differ from the brand names in purity,
>fillers, the level of testing they've undergone, and the level of quality
>control excercised over the production process. Since a Name Brand has
>a huge investment in public goodwill that Brand X does not, the Name
>Brand has a greater incentive to ensure the safety of the product than
>Brand X does. So when you buy the Name Brand, you have a lower risk of
>death than when you buy Brand X.
Nice theory, but it doesn't hold up in REAL LIFE. First, name brand
manufacturers often repackage identical products for other sellers
(who often sell at much reduced prices. Such as store brands, and even
sometimes generics.) Second, I'd like to see you show some evidence of
statistically greater risk of death from generic drugs for the reason you cite.
It's interesting that independent organizations that criticize the drug
industry heavily for dangerous products DON'T criticize generics for being
more dangerous, and freely recommend substituting them.
>One piece of evidence that consumers are aware of this is that although
>many adults buy generic aspirin for themselves, they are much less likely
>to buy generic CHILDREN'S aspirin for their kids. Parents won't take as
>many chances with their children's health as they will with their own;
>this is consistent across a wide range of behaviors.
Consumers do lots of irrational things without sound basis. I'm amused that
you accept behavioral endorsement for an argument by people so ignorant that
they'd repeal most of the Bill of Rights. Consumers are primarily aware of what
marketing propaganda has told them. Propaganda such as your "quality and
safety" argument. Thus, using consumer endorsement of an idea is really a
circular argument.
>Name brands contain an informational value that customers are willing to
>pay for. They provide information about the safety and consistency of
>the product.
Once again, we have detachment from reality. Name brands are no guarantee of
consistency of anything. Except perhaps higher prices. Products are routinely
changed by corporations for a multitude of reasons. Not necessarily for the
better.
REAL information about safety and consistency (as opposed to marketing
propaganda) comes from labelling and standardization. These come primarily
from government regulation. Industry seldom provides them if it can help it.
Mike Huben
Strephon: "Have you the heart to apply the prosaic rules of evidence to a
case brimming with such poetical emotion?"
Chancellor: "Distinctly."
From "Iolanthe", by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Steve Gustafson
Erich Schwarz quoth:
SG> Democratic populists like the Gablers believe that all ideas are equal.
> Whose ideas about the origin of the universe are right? Stephen
> Hawking's, or Rev. Oarbus Beauregard "Jimbo" Pettymind of the Holiness
> Church of the Foursquare Trinity with Signs Following?
ES>Right, but the more subtle problem--which I think Gordon Fitch sees,
>but that maybe you don't--is that *all* of us are Gablers at least
>sometimes, and maybe more than sometimes. If we're Dictator-for-Life,
>who'll tell us?
Two comments:
First, I have not proposed an absolute dictatorship or monarchy, but a
limited aristocracy. By definition, the majority will be hostile to
freedom when it counts; no one needs freedom to think what his
neighbours think, or do what his neighbours do. Therefore, the best way
to preserve freedom is to put it into the hands of a group of
intellectuals who see themselves as different from the common man; or,
failing that, a hereditary aristocracy bred with a tradition of superior
educations, standards of good taste, and a sense of position that lets
them hold themselves apart from the common man.
I would not put these aristocrats in the position of the Gablers. Their
powers would be wholly negative: to avoid prohibitions, overturn rules,
discharge liabilities, set prisoners free, not to impose prohibitions or
rules, impose penalties, or put anyone in gaol.
Second, even without public debate, on scientific questions the office
politics of scientists is usually enough to keep the search for truth on
roughly the right track. If you really do have a better idea, you can
climb to the position of king of the hill on its strength; and
scientists, like most other primates, find this a strong incentive.
ES>The strength of democracy is not the vast intelligence of the common
>people, but that their collective dislikes and distrusts are more steady
>and sustainable than the brilliant errors of self-appointed superior men.
>The weakness of democracy is that eventually the common people start
>picking leaders who don't in any way threaten their mediocrity.
To the weaknesses of democracy, I would add that it intensifies the
weaknesses of humanity. Since we are violent by nature, democratic
movements often move towards violence. Since we are suspicious of
outsiders, democracy gives this unworthy emotion a powerful voice.
Hitler, after all, was swept to power by a powerful mass movement. Even
now, as we speak, mass democratic movements are arising in Europe to
exclude or punish foreigners in various countries. Reasonable people
who are acquainted with history should be suspicious of fascists and
communists, and they both have made strong showings in recent Italian
elections. Look at the American love of negative campaigning, and
political advertisements that appeal to hatred.
ES>The only
>reason why I feel more hopeful about the U.S. than not is that, despite the
>open path to self-destruction thus in front of America, it's outlived a lot
>of aristocratic states. Empirically, American mob-ocracy doesn't seem to
>have done as badly as its illiberal critics might reasonably predict.
What has kept America going is that the major political parties have
generally not been strongly polarized by ideology. For most of our
history, while you may have supported the Republicans or the Democrats,
you at least believed that if the other fellow was elected it was not an
unmitigated disaster; the officials of the opposing party were not
traitors, thieves, or villains. Your allegiance to one or the other was
more a matter of where you were born, your ethnic origin and your
religion rather than your more abstract political beliefs. In many
areas, one party dominated, and the real decisions were made in the
backrooms and presented to the voters for formal ratification.
When the parties turned ideological in the 1800's, we had a Civil War.
It seems to me that now that the Republicans are all "conservative" and
the Democrats all "liberal," the level of rancor between them has
substantially increased. Disaffected groups like the gun lobby are
already turning to terrorism. I suspect democracy's days may be
numbered here.
---
. OLX 2.2 . Trompeblulo naski<gis <ciuminute.
Chris Holt
>What has kept America going is that the major political parties have
>generally not been strongly polarized by ideology. For most of our
>history, while you may have supported the Republicans or the Democrats,
>you at least believed that if the other fellow was elected it was not an
>unmitigated disaster; the officials of the opposing party were not
>traitors, thieves, or villains.
I think you're underestimating the intensity of politcal fervour
in the past.
> Your allegiance to one or the other was
>more a matter of where you were born, your ethnic origin and your
>religion rather than your more abstract political beliefs. In many
>areas, one party dominated, and the real decisions were made in the
>backrooms and presented to the voters for formal ratification.
And this led to a lot of corruption, of course.
>When the parties turned ideological in the 1800's, we had a Civil War.
>It seems to me that now that the Republicans are all "conservative" and
>the Democrats all "liberal," the level of rancor between them has
>substantially increased.
Are they really more polarized than in the '60s (when Goldwater
ran) or the '70s (when McGovern ran)? When the last election
was between two centrists like Bush and Clinton?
>Disaffected groups like the gun lobby are
>already turning to terrorism. I suspect democracy's days may be
>numbered here.
Terrorism? I thought that was still mainly in the inner cities,
and had very little to do with middle class disaffection.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris...@newcastle.ac.uk Computing Science, U of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
And if I drink oblivion of a day, / So shorten I the stature of my liver.
Russell Turpin
In article <bryner.841...@chemistry.utah.edu>, Roger Bryner <bry...@chemistry.utah.edu> wrote:
> ... There exists a construction of the three geomitries that
> includes as a postulate that two parallel lines
>
> 1) must interscet.
> 2) will not interscet.
> 3) will diverge.
If one were writing a logic for maintenance of the presidential
mansion, one might include the axiom "the house is white."
WITHIN THAT LOGIC, there are no purple houses, just as in the
theory of real numbers there are no complex numbers, and just as
in Euclidean geometry (a very restricted formal system) there are
no intersecting parallel lines.
There are hundreds of formal systems. (A mathematician or
logician or theoretically-minded computer scientist can name a
dozen while standing on one foot.) But there is no
incompatibility between white houses and purple houses, between
real numbers and complex numbers, and between parallel lines that
do not intersect and those that do. It is not hard to a create a
provably consistent formal system that includes parallel lines
that intersect, parallel lines that do not intersect, white
houses, and purple houses. (And the proof of consistency will be
as objective as any.)
>The three are not compatable. QED.
Again, you are wrong. Intersecting parallel lines do not exist
WITHIN EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY. This does *not* show that
intersecting parallel lines are incompatible with
non-intersecting parallel lines.
Robert Vienneau
1.0 INTRODUCTION
This article presents a Sraffian interpretation of Marx and
investigates how much of the Labor Theory of Value is logically viable.
The interpretation is presented by means of a simple two good example,
thus restricting to arithmetic the mathematics needed to follow this
exposition.
2.0 PHYSICAL DATA
Consider a simple capitalist economy that produces only two goods,
corn and ale. Assume the amount of corn and ale produced each year are
given, as well as the production processes used in each industry. Corn
and ale are each produced by processes that require a year to complete.
These processes require a certain number of workers to be hired at the
beginning of the year, as well as the purchase of certain quantities of
of corn and ale to be used as inputs in production. Operating these
processes then produces certain quantities of outputs of corn and labor
for use at the end of the year. Table 1 shows the amount of inputs per
unit output for both industries. The data allow for surplus
production, that is for more corn and ale to be produced than are used
as inputs.
TABLE 1: THE TECHNIQUE OF PRODUCTION
INPUTS HIRED
AT START OF CORN ALE
YEAR INDUSTRY INDUSTRY
Labor 1 Person-year 1 Person-Year
Corn 1/8 Bushels 3/8 Bushels
Ale 1/16 Bottles 1/16 Bottles
OUTPUTS 1 Bushel 1 Bottle
Although these data are given in physical terms, production
conditions should not be thought of as reflecting purely technical
relationships. They also embody social relations, including elements
of class struggle. For example, Table 1 might implictly rely on
assumptions about the length of the working day, the intensity with
which laborers work, how often breaks are allowed, and other elements
of general working conditions.
Another point of contention is the role of labor time in the data.
Different concrete activities are required in producing corn and ale.
Since labor is measured in a single unit, person-years, these
differences have been abstracted from, as is indeed the case when labor
power is sold on the market.
3.0 LABOR VALUES
3.1 The Calculation of Labor Values
Marx claimed that labor values reveal certain fundamental
characteristics of Capitalism, especially as regards the exploitation
of labor. Before this claim can be investigated by means of the above
example, the labor values embodied in corn and ale must first be
determined. Three equivalent methods of calculating labor values from
the physical data are presented here.
3.1.1 A System of Equations
The first method of calculating labor values postulates that labor
is embodied in corn or ale in their production. For example, the labor
embodied in corn is the sum of one person year and the labor embodied
in 1/8 bushels of corn and 1/16 bottles of ale. The production process
for ale yields a similar relationship. These relationships are
expressed in Equations 3-1 and 3-2:
1 + (1/8) vc + (1/16) va = vc (3-1)
1 + (3/8) vc + (1/16) va = va, (3-2)
where vc and va are the labor values of a bushel of corn and a bottle
of ale, respectively. This system of two linear equations in two
unknowns has an unique solution. A bushel of corn embodies 1 13/51
person years, and a bottle of ale embodies 1 29/51 labor years.
3.1.2 Vertically Integrated Subsystems
The second method of calculating labor values is to imagine
rearranging the data to reflect vertical integration of corn and ale
production. The economy is assumed to produce a given amount of corn
and ale and to require given quantities of corn and ale as inputs in
production, leaving certain net quantities of corn and ale available.
For the corn industry, group that portion of the corn and ale
industries needed to replace the corn used up in producing the net
surplus of corn. On a per bushel basis, this vertical integration
results in Table 2:
TABLE 2: THE CORN SUBSYSTEM
INPUTS HIRED
AT START OF CORN ALE
YEAR INDUSTRY INDUSTRY
Labor 1 3/17 Person-year 4/51 Person-Year
Corn 5/34 Bushels 3/102 Bushels
Ale 5/68 Bottles 1/204 Bottles
OUTPUTS 1 3/17 Bushel 4/51 Bottle
Notice that the net output of this combination of industries is one
bushel of corn. The total labor requirements are 1 13/51 person years
per bushel. Thus, this method of calculation yields the same labor
value for corn as the first method.
Table 3 shows similar results of vertically integrating the ale
industry. Here the net output is one bottle of ale, and the labor
requirements are 1 29/51 person years, as expected.
TABLE 3: THE ALE SUBSYSTEM
INPUTS HIRED
AT START OF CORN ALE
YEAR INDUSTRY INDUSTRY
Labor 8/17 Person-year 1 5/51 Person-Year
Corn 1/17 Bushels 7/17 Bushels
Ale 1/34 Bottles 7/102 Bottles
OUTPUTS 8/17 Bushel 1 5/51 Bottle
3.1.3 Reduction to Dated Labor
The third method is only presented schematically and only for
calculating the labor value of corn. Begin by imagining the current
technique of production has been used forever in the past. The
production of one bushel corn requires the inputs of 1/8 bushels corn
and 1/16 bottles of ale, as well as one person year. Replace the
material inputs of corn production by their own inputs. That is, 1/8
bushels corn and 1/16 bottles ale, purchased at the beginning of the
given year, required inputs of 5/128 bushels corn, 3/256 bottles ale,
and 3/16 person years, all available a year before the given year.
Continue forever this process of replacing produced inputs by the
inputs used in their producion. This method will result in an infinite
stream of labor inputs, all properly dated. The given year's corn
output with the given technique requires labor inputs extending back to
Adam and Eve. Table 4 presents the first few terms in this series.
TABLE 4: DATED CORN PRODUCTION
INPUTS/OUTPUT
YEAR Corn Ale Labor
0 1 Bushel
-1 1/8 Bushels 1/16 Bottles 1 Person years
-2 5/128 Bushels 3/256 Bottles 3/16 Person years
-3 19/2048 Bushels 13/4096 Bottles 13/256 Person years
.
.
.
---------------------------------------------------------
SUM 1 13/51 Person Years
The (finite) sum of the infinite series of labor inputs illustrated
by Table 4 is the labor value embodied in a bushel of corn. This sum
turns out to be equal to the labor value for corn already calculated in
either of the other two methods. This method can also be applied to
ale, resulting in the correct answer as well.
3.2 Exploitation
Now that labor values have been defined for this simple example,
Marxian exploitation can be explored. Some further assumptions are
necessary. Assume that the workers are paid at the end of the year,
that they immediately consume all of their wages, and that they spend
them so as to buy three bushels of corn for every bottle of ale. THIS
IS A VERY SPECIAL PROPORTION FOR THE EXAMPLE. Table 5 shows the inputs
and outputs for a single person year expended in producing wage goods.
TABLE 5: THE PRODUCTION OF THE STANDARD COMMODITY
INPUTS HIRED
AT START OF CORN ALE
YEAR INDUSTRY INDUSTRY
Labor 3/4 Person-years 1/4 Person-Years
Corn 3/32 Bushels 3/32 Bushels
Ale 3/64 Bottles 1/64 Bottles
OUTPUTS 3/4 Bushels 1/4 Bottles
The gross output of wage goods per person years is 3/4 bushels corn
and 1/4 bottles ale. The "constant capital" needed to produce this
output is 3/16 bushels corn and 1/16 bottles ale, leaving a net output
of 9/16 bushels and 3/16 bottles. Let w denote the proportion of this
net output paid to the workers in the form of wages, where w ranges
from zero to unity. The remainder stays in the hands of the
capitalists in the form of profits.
Since the labor values of corn and ale are known, the physical
quantities corresponding to capital, wages, and profits can be
evaluated as labor values. The labor value, C, of the constant capital
is given by Display 3-3:
C = (3/16 Bushels) (64/51 Person Years per Bushel )
+ (1/16 Bottles) (80/51 Person Years per Bottle)
= 1/3 Person Years (3-3)
The labor value of goods consumed out of wages, called "variable
capital" by Marx and denoted by V, is given in Display 3-4:
V = (9/16) w (64/51) + (3/16) w (80/51)
= w Person Years (3-4)
The labor value of the goods remaining in the capitalist's hands after
replacing the means of producing and paying out wages, "surplus value"
S, is given by Display 3-5:
S = (9/16) (1 - w) (64/51) + (3/16) (1 - w) (80/51)
= ( 1 - w ) Person Years (3-5)
Notice that the labor value of gross output, 1 1/3 person years, is the
sum C+V+S.
The capitalists running firms in the wage good industry only end up
with any goods remaining after paying their costs if the wage is less
than unity. This means that although laborers work for a full year,
the goods they buy out of their wages embody less than a person year.
This is Marxian exploitation. An important parameter in Marxian
thought is the "rate of exploitation" e. The rate of exploitation is
defined by Equation 3-6:
e = S/V = ( 1 - w)/w (3-6)
The first volume of _Capital_ was largely devoted to explaining how it
can come about that workers are exploited. Why is it that the workers
buy goods with their wages embodying less labor than they expend in
earning them?
Marx's answer revolved around the distinction between "labor power"
and "labor." What the worker sells is not so many hours of labor time,
but the ability to work for that amount of time, this latter commodity
being known as labor power. Like all commodities, labor power has a
value. In this case the labor value is the labor needed to produce the
goods the workers consume to maintain themselves so as to be able to
work for the desired period. Once they have purchased the commodity
labor-power, the capitalists obtain its use value, which is so many
hours of labor. The secret of exploitation under capitalism, according
to Marx, is the difference between the use value of labor power, that
is to say the labor hours expended in production by the workers, and
the labor value of labor power, the number of hours needed to produce
the goods the workers consume.
Exploitation under Capitalism is perfectly consistent with
unconstrained trade, as Marx knew full well:
This sphere...within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of
labour-power goes on is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of
man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham.
Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of
labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They
contract as free agents...Equality, because each enters into relation
with the other as a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange
equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of
what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself.
Nevertheless, Marx thought the workers are exploited.
The rate of profits in terms of labor value terms is the ratio of
surplus value to the expenditures layed out at the beginning of the
production period. Since this model, in (sometime) contrast with Marx,
assumes workers are paid at the end of the year, the rate of profits in
value terms is merely the ratio of surplus value to constant capital:
pi = S/C = 3 ( 1 - w ) (3-8)
Equation 3-8 is the last relationship in the system of labor-values to be
examined here.
4.0 PRICES OF PRODUCTION
No agent in this model is conscious of labor values. Capitalists do
not try to maximize the labor value of their profit. Nor do workers
try to maximize the labor value of their wages. Capitalist and worker
alike worry about price. So the question arises in what sense, if any,
can exploitation as described by the system of labor values cast
insight on price relationships?
Uniform prices, wages, and rate of profits cannot be expected to
prevail at any given time. Some buyers of corn will be paying a higher
price than others, and the same will go for ale. Some workers will be
getting higher than the going wage and others less. Some firms will
have an unusually high rate of profit. These differences in a
competitive market will engender a kind of leveling process. Prices of
corn, ale, and labor power will tend toward a uniform value in all
markets. Similarly, one rate of profit will provide a center of
gravitational attraction for the market rate.
We can imagine a price system associated with our physical data
where this leveling process has been completed. These "prices of
production" or "cost prices" can be thought of as centers of attraction
for the observable "market prices." Prices of production are such that
they are unchanged at the end of the production period. They also
allow the system to reproduce itself. These two conditions, when
imposed on the physical data, result in the system of equations given
by Equations 4-1 and 4-2:
[ (1/8) pc + (1/16) pa ] (1 + r) + w = pc (4-1)
[ (3/8) pc + (1/16) pa ] (1 + r) + w = pa, (4-2)
where pc is the price of corn, pa is the price of ale, w is the wage,
and r is the rate of profit. This system embodies the assumption that
workers are paid at the end of the year. The use of the same symbol
for the wage as in the labor value analysis implicitly assumes that the
numeraire is the net output of the "standard industry," that is 9/16
bushels corn and 3/16 bottles ale. The adoption of this numeraire
imposes an additional equation:
(9/16) pc + (3/16) pa = 1 (4-3)
Equations 4-1, 4-2, and 4-3 provide a system of three equations in four
unknowns. They can be solved for three of the unknowns, say prices and
the rate of profit, in terms of the remaining unknown, the wage.
4.1 The Solution Prices
Prices of production of corn and ale in terms of wages are given by
Equations 4-4 and 4-5:
pc = 64 / [ 3 (20 - 3 w) ] (4-4)
pa = 16 (8 - 3 w ) / [ 3 (20 - 3 w) ] (4-5)
Suppose wages consume the total net output. So w = 1, and the workers
are not exploited. Then prices are 1 13/51 dollars for a bushel of
corn and 1 29/51 dollars for a bottle of ale. These are also the labor
values of corn and ale. If and only if the workers are not exploited,
labor values provide centers of attraction for market prices.
Generally, the workers will not be paid the whole output. For wages
less than unity prices of production will deviate from labor values.
In general, there is no regular pattern to these movements. As the
wage falls, prices of production can rise and fall in a very
complicated fashion. Does this mean prices are unrelated to the labor
embodied in goods? Not exactly. Rather, prices of production are
dependent on the whole time stream of labor inputs, not just the total
labor value. Section 3.1.3 showed how to reduce the physical data to a
stream of dated labor inputs. Prices of production are the sum of the
wages paid out to the workers for these labor inputs weighted by the
rate of profits appropriate for each particular date. Equations 4-6
and 4-7 express this proposition mathematically:
2
pc = w + (3/16) w (1 + r) + (13/256) w (1 + r) + ... (4-6)
2
pa = w + (7/16) w (1 + r) + (25/256) w (1 + r) + ... (4-7)
The problem with a simple labor theory of value as a theory of price is
that prices do not merely depend on the total labor embodied in
commodities. Rather, the entire time distribution of labor inputs is
essential. Since these distributions vary among different industries,
the prices of production associated with different levels of wages will
be different. Essentially, the problem is one of time. This
observation does not make me a proto-Austrian as regards capital
theory.
4.2 Prices and Values Compared
The price of production system allows one to establish a
relationship between the rate of profits and wages:
r = 3 ( 1 - w ) (4-8)
Because of the choice of numeraire, the rate of profit is a linear
function of wages. In fact, the rate of profit in the price system,
given by Equation 4-8, is equal to the rate of profit in terms of labor
values (see Equation 3-8 above).
This observation draws one connection between labor values and
prices, thereby supporting the assertion that labor values reveal
something fundamental about the capitalist system. Some other
interesting comparisons are shown by examining the employment of one
person year in the production of the standard commodity (Table 6),
which, by assumption, is the wage good.
TABLE 6: PRICES COMPARED WITH VALUES IN THE
PRODUCTION OF THE STANDARD COMMODITY
QUANTITY LABOR VALUE PRICE
Gross output
(3/4 Bushels, 1/4 Bottles) 1 1/3 Person Years $1 1/3
Constant capital
(3/16 Bushels, 1/16 Bottles) 1/3 Person Years $ 1/3
Net Output
(9/16 Bushels, 3/16 Bottles) 1 Person Years $ 1
Variable capital
(w 9/16 Bushels, w 3/16 Bottles) w Person Years $ w
Surplus/Profits (1 - w) Person Years $ (1 - w)
In the production of the standard commodity, total prices equal
total labor values, and total profits equal total surplus value. It is
as if profits are generated by the exploitation shown in the labor
value system. They are redistributed such that each industry gains
profit in proportion to their outlay, not according to the amount of
labor directly employed. This redistribution results in prices of
production that deviate from labor values. The mathematics associated
with the standard commodity suggests that the labor theory of value may
have some validity when treated as a theory of exploitation.
5.0 RAISING MANY QUESTIONS
This article has outlined an argument suggesting that market prices
are attracted by prices of production and these prices, in turn, are a
veil over essential exploitative features of Capitalism. This
conclusion should be viewed with caution.
Not all commodities are paid out as wages. Even if wages are
consumed in the standard proportions, neither the net nor the gross
outputs need to be in those proportions. If the output for the economy
as a whole is in different proportions, total profits may deviate from
total surplus values. Likewise, total prices and total labor values
may differ. This may make one wonder about the above story whereby
surplus value extracted from the workers is redistributed to appear in
the surface form of profit.
The assumption that wages are in the standard proportion is
perfectly arbitrary. Usually, this assumption will not hold. But none
of the properties of the above model depended on this assumption. What
they required was the wage be measured in terms of the standard
commodity, that the standard commodity be numeraire. Is this enough to
make the properties of equality between prices and values, profit and
surplus value of interest? After all, the standard commodity is in
some sense a commodity of average capital intensity, of an average
organic composition of capital. On the other hand, modern economists
are unlikely to be convinced by properties that are this dependent on
the choice of a numeraire. Why should the standard commodity be
privileged in this fashion?
There is another aspect of these models that may justify the Marxist
theory of exploitation, The Fundamental Theorem of Marxism. Profit is
positive in the price system if and only if labor is exploited. This
theorem generalizes easier than some of the properties highlighted
above. Perhaps this is sufficient to justify interest in Marxian labor
values. But corn and ale are exploited too. Labor power can be
considered as produced by the goods consumed by the workers, and the
physical data can be used to calculate "corn values" or "ale values" as
well. Furthermore, causation in the theorem can be read either way.
It may be that the workers are exploited because profits are positive,
not that profits are positive because the workers are exploited. Once
again one is left wondering what's so special about labor.
Marx and those who understand these models have given many reasons
for focusing on labor. These reasons transcend the formal properties
that can easily be demonstrated mathematically. Instead, one has to
consider philosophy, history, and sociology.
How many have made it this far without long ago consuming a bottle
of ale?
Robert Vienneau
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The 'transformation algorithm' is precisely of the following form:
'contemplate two alternative and discordant systems. Write down one.
Now transform by taking an eraser and rubbing it out. Then fill in the
other one. Voila! You have completed your transformation algorithm.'
-- Paul Samuelson
It can scarcely be overemphasized that the project of providing a
materialist account of capitalist societies is dependent on Marx's
value magnitude analysis only in the negative sense that continued
adherence to the latter is a major fetter on the development of the
former.
-- Ian Steedman
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Roda
> A SRAFFIAN INTERPRETATION OF MARX
>
>1.0 INTRODUCTION
>
the absurdity of this, set up any company that is losing money (making a
negative profit) and run its numbers through the silly exploitation
equations. You will see that the exploitation factors become negative.
We must stop those damn workers, they are exploiting the capatalists! :->
BTW: Land is an existance proof against labor value theory.
--
--
PGP 2.3 Public key by mail | Richard E. Roda <rer...@eos.ncsu.edu>
Disclaimer--------------------------------------------------------------
| The opinions expressed above are those of a green alien who spoke to |
| me in a vision. They do not necessarily represent the views of NCSU |
| or any other person, dead or alive, or of any entity on Earth. |
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Criminals prefer unarmed victims. Oppose gun control.
Drug Dealers prefer a monopoly. Support legalization of drugs.
Michael Friedman
I found this very interesting and thought provoking. Thank you for posting it.
I do have one comment and two questions.
Comment: This seems to ignore the input of the Capitalist. What does
the capitalist contribute to the picture?
Question: Say that the amount of labor that it takes to produce a
bushel of corn or barrel of ale depends on how much ale and corn one
has to contribute to the process?
Now, suddenly, the labor value of each good becomes much more
difficult to calculate. On the other hand, when the capitalist
supplies corn and ale he is doing something that makes the workers
more productive. It is no longer clear in this case that labor value
of the corn and ale produced by a man year of work is just a man year.
Now there is a surplus, and the capitalist can make a profit while the
laborer gets more corn and ale than he could produce in a year without
the capitalist. Another way of doing this would be to add an extra
good - Fixed Plant that is very expensive but which can be used year
after year to make corn and ale rather than being used up.
Question: What happens if you assume that the labor that goes into
each good decreases over time?
In article <2e5r13$5...@samba.oit.unc.edu> Robert....@launchpad.unc.edu (Robert Vienneau) writes:
>
Robert Vienneau
> ...Robert Vienneau writes:
>> A SRAFFIAN INTERPRETATION OF MARX
>>
>>1.0 INTRODUCTION
>>
You must have had a few pints before reading. I have certainly posted
similar ideas, but not that post. I get tired of reading incompetent
criticisms and expositions of the Labor Theory of Value.
>...For those who want a good chuckle at
>the absurdity of this, set up any company that is losing money (making a
>negative profit) and run its numbers through the silly exploitation
>equations. You will see that the exploitation factors become negative.
>
>We must stop those damn workers, they are exploiting the capatalists! :->
Cute, but you do not understand Marx's "cost prices" or Smith and
Ricardo's "natural prices." A company making negative prices belongs to
the system of market prices, not the system of prices of production,
where finance has ceased flowing from one sector to another because the
rate of profit is the same everywhere. (Obviously this is a logical
construction intended to make sense out of observed tendencies.)
>
>BTW: Land is an exist[e]nce proof against labor value theory.
If the rest of your post showed a rigorous understanding of labor
values, I might think this insightful. You want a full exposition of
an example with land in which a labor theory of value works as well (or
not) as in the previous example? I know how to produce one.
Robert Vienneau
Thant Tessman
In article <2ej6de$5...@samba.oit.unc.edu>,
Robert....@launchpad.unc.edu writes:
> [...] You want a full exposition of
> an example with land in which a labor theory of value works as well (or
> not) as in the previous example? I know how to produce one.
> Robert Vienneau
It's true. He's very clever with math. He can demonstrate any
economic conclusion he wants.
thant