From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Tue Jun 05 2007 - 05:26:19 EDT
Rakesh Pauls Adler and Cockshott are probably best positioned to address this simple point. A PC can be bought cheap today relative to prices three decades ago. Why? The main answer: the rising productivity of microprocessor engineers as a result of both design automation which has drastically reduced the time required for checking speeds and gates and computer simulations which have eliminated hours and hours of wasted labor on the development and actual production of failed models and design I am in general agreement with the passages from Hilferding that you quote. I think that Hilferding had long before Mises provided a response to Mises assertion that calculation in labour time was in principle impossible because of Non commensurability of skilled and unskilled labour. On the role of design automation, this is one factor, but probably a secondary one in the fall of PC prices. More important is the role of copying technologies, which Babbage long ago identified as a key factor in raising productivity. PC chips are produced by a variant of printing technology, the printing is photographic and on a very small scale, but it, like the printing press bebore it, allows standardised flat objects to be replicated with an amount of labour that is relatively independent of the detail involved. In consequence, more and more of what were once distinct chips - of the order of a hundred on original models of PC, are now integrated into just a few large chips. Both todays chips and 1980s chips are produced by photographic processes but the improved detail achieved by modern photo lithography allows far fewer components to be used. The labour input to production is proportional to the number of chips placed on the board times the labour input that goes into each chip. The latter - for large chips processor chips at least, has not fallen drastically and may even have marginally risen. On the other hand the design time per transistor of the processor chip certainly has fallen thanks to the use of high level design tools. This rise in productivity measured in transistors placed per working day, has largely been consumed by designing more an more complex chips, since the numbers of transitors per design has grown exponentially. The final think to take into account is the amortisation of the designs across much larger production runs. This is particularly noticeable in the other mass market for processor chips - mobile phones. s
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