From: GERALD LEVY (gerald_a_levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Tue Dec 11 2007 - 09:31:25 EST
What we can empirically measure, is such things as: - the (total) costs to capital of labour employed (not just the gross wage, but also various levies) - the (total, i.e. current disposable income + deferred income) of the worker - the expenditure of the worker's labour income on goods and services - the goods and services purchased by the worker - the difference between direct and indirect taxes and levies charged, and social security benefits received - the costs of replacing the worker (including the costs of raising children) - the paid and unpaid labourtime involved in reproducing the worker to arrive each day fit to work ====================================== Hi Jurriaan: What statistics are available which allow us to make international comparisons for the last two things identified above? ====================================== - the realised income differential of skilled labour resulting from education & training, or seniority - the financial benefit deriving from skill monopolisation - the economic rent that ensues from labour scarcity Insofar as the VLP includes, as Marx says, a "moral-historical element", no complete measurement of the VLP is ever possible which is incontestable, ======================================== Agreed. the difficulty of estimating the "moral-historical element" is also compounded by the fact that in some social formations, firms pay-out to workers in direct compensation and benefits monies for goods or services which in other social formations are paid by the state and represent a sort of "social wage". As for the question which you originally raised (before I side-tracked it), whether changes in food prices cause a change in the VLP (or a change in real wages) depends on whether the change in food prices is short-term and temporary or long-term. If the price of wheat goes up in the next 3 months but falls afterwards, then during those 3 months real wages would decline ceteris paribus but this does not mean that the VLP itself will change. In solidarity, Jerry
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