From: clyder@gn.apc.org
Date: Sun Dec 15 2002 - 16:08:07 EST
Just one more point in respect to 8165 I argued that between trades one can only treat the average labours of each trade as equivalent when estimating how much labour socially necessary to produce a product. I believe that this is a consequence of retaining Marx's labour /labour power distinction - or what is almost equivalent the fact that the length of the working day is left as an unbound variable. Clearly the work of training a programmer is socially necessary for the programs she writes, so that there would appear to be a case for imputing the training time to the labour socially necessary for her product. However one can only validly do this if one holds the length of the working day to be fixed. If it is a variable, the number of hours of training imputed to each our of active labour becomes indeterminate. All of this relates simply to the procedures necessary in the drawing up of labour accounts. It does not translate directly into any hypothesis about prices. Indeed given the causal model that I advocated earlier, one would expect industries that paid above average wages to sell their products at above their values. This is not something that I have explicitly tested, though it is possible that some indirect evidence could be extrated from existing published results.
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