From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Mon Jun 18 2007 - 13:31:31 EDT
Prof. Perelman wrote: What I meant was that it is hopeless to think that anyone could quantify the amount of abstract labor in an economy. You could possibly get the total number of hours, but using wages as an indication of the amount of abstract labor reflected in those hours does not make sense to me. If wages (the price of labor) reflect values, why not use prices everywhere & throw out values altogether -- a la Joan Robinson? Reply: in human society there are an enormous amount of phenomena which we can cognise only qualitatively, and which we cannot "measure" objectively, but the fact that this is so doesn't mean that we cannot quantify many things anyway, nor that objectivity is impossible, because we cannot measure in the empiricist sense. When Heisenberg discovered he could not measure the movement of some subatomic particles, this did not cause him to abandon physics. Often, although we cannot quantify a trend as a whole, we can develop (maybe indirect) indicators of the trend, and that's useful. Using data on average hours worked and on the labour force, plus data from time-use surveys, we can obtain a fairly good indication of the total hours of paid and unpaid labour-hours worked. And we can relate that to net output data and incomes. Even if the estimates are fairly crude, they can reveal some significant trends about the valuation of labour-time. A few foundational reasons for keeping a concept of economic value are that: - it is an indispensable assumption (or presupposition) for grouping, relating, measuring and aggregating prices in a non-arbitrary way. - ideal prices cannot be inferred from real prices, without reference to assumptions about economic value. - all accounting presupposes concepts of comparable value (value equivalence), value used up, conserved value, transferred value, and newly created value. - at any time, most products and assets in an economy have a real value to which human behaviour responds, although they have no actual price (at best only an estimated ideal price). - only if we have a concept of value, can we reasonably talk about the conservation of the value of things traded, through successive exchanges, and through time. - the attribution of value to products and assets is a vital human process in the economising of resources, irrespective of whether it involves pricing. - an explanation of prices in terms of other prices leads to an infinite regress, which does not adequately explain how prices are formed. - the measurement and valuation of labour-time continues to be essential for the functioning of the capitalist economy. The more economists banish the notion of economic value in favour of talk about prices, the more it becomes evident that their talk about prices implicitly *assumes* concepts of economic value. I agree, it is impossible to measure a number of Marx's theorems directly, but others we can measure fairly well. Therefore, the choice is not between qualitative and a quantitative theory, but between a theory which can be quantatively tested in maybe limited ways, and an interpretation which cannot be quantitatively verified at all. Insofar as a refined pricing exists for all kind of labour, and insofar as people know very well the average time it takes to perform a task, there exists a lot of data you can use to test a labour theory of value. Jurriaan
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