At 18:39 29/09/00 -0400, ope-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu wrote: >3) Taken together, steps (1) and (2) imply that the value of a unit of >labor power is the labor time socially necessary to reproduce that >unit--that is, the labor time embodied in the subsistence wage bundle. >This is a necessary consequence of Marx's arguments in Chapters 1 and 6. > >4) There are two ways of measuring the value of labor power defined above: > one is by summing the embodied labor values of each of the goods in the >subsistence wage bundle. Denote this by the vector product b*v(b), where b >is the subsistence wage bundle and v(b) is the corresponding vector of unit >labor values for the goods in the wage bundle. Another way to measure it >is by taking the money wage rate *just necessary to ensure subsistence*, >measured in the units of some money commodity, and multiplying it by the >unit value of that money commodity, say the value of gold v(g)--thus, w*v(g). > >5) The two methods will not in general give the same number for the value >of labor power. > You are of course formally right when dealing with purely mathematical models. However, where is the sensitivity analysis here. By what percentage do the two measures differ in typical economiew today? More abstractly, given a large set of industries with random distributions of organic compositions of capital - following some appropriate Gaussian distribution, and then if we select from this population of industries a subset corresponding to roughly 50% of the output by price/value designate these the wage good industries. Under these circumstances what would be the difference between your two measures above? Paul Cockshott (clyder@gn.apc.org)
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