Re: measurement of abstract labor

From: Paul C (clyder@GN.APC.ORG)
Date: Sat Jun 19 2004 - 15:44:19 EDT


Ian Wright wrote:

>
>
>The low price does mean that some of your labour-time is
>retrospectively counted as less than socially necessary. You wasted
>some time. But the value of the commodity does not change.
>
>I can take the socially necessary amount of time to produce a
>particular commodity but if no-one wants to buy it then my labour was
>socially unnecessary. Is there something wrong with this?
>
>

Just that the language involves a loss of information. To distinct
causes are categorised
the same way. Since it is possible in principle to distinguish them
perhaps we should
have different terms for the two situations.

As an information processing system, the price mechanism can not
distinguish these
causes,  it is too low a bandwidth channel. But theoretically we should
have some
terminology to distinguish them.


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