Re: [OPE] Invention, Inventors, and the Productivity of Labor

Does my argument mean that an affluent society is condemned to have any kind of market (even the quasi-market under Market Socialism) to attain a high rate of technical change?   I don’t think so. Consider the following quotation from Henry D. Dickinson:   “[…] in an equalitarian economy which had atteined a very high level of technical efficiency, human labour might be so scarce compared with other factors of production that costing might be based on it alone. If, furthermore, equal educational opportunities and occupational mobility levelled out the distinctions between labour of different kinds, labour might come to be costed on the simple basis of time. In this way the costing system of the socialist community would gradually come to be based upon the Labour Theory of Value.” (Dickinson, 1971:43) http://books.google.es/books?id=8f_BGCcwl_AC&pg=PR3&lpg=PR3&dq=%22Henry+D.+Dickinson%22&source=web&ots=QHZB7CazPL&sig=5AmFy4rsJl5OvMuvUNcPaaaMYjY&hl=es&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result#PPR3,M1     I have to think more about this. But if human labour comes to be so scarce compared with other factors of production, this situation could make irrelevant the motivational side of any kind of market.   So Market Socialism is maybe the most slender model of transition!   Regards,A. Agafonow ________________________________ De: Dave Zachariah <davez@kth.se> Para: Outline on Political Economy mailing list <ope@lists.csuchico.edu> Enviado: domingo, 2 de noviembre, 2008 12:38:27 Asunto: Re: [OPE] Invention, Inventors, and the Productivity of Labor on 2008-11-02 11:27 Alejandro Agafonow wrote: > > Why these salaried workers don’t produce these inventions by their own? > >  > The lack of capital is not enough, since it is possible to borrow this capital. > >  > I think the answer comes from more subtle phenomena coming from the degree of risk averse of entrepreneurs. A low degree of risk averse is needed to embark on risky projects. > >  > We can’t neglect this soft side of the problem if we want a socialist institutional design able to reach the rate of technological change of capitalism. > > By the way, most socialist institutional designs encourage a high degree of risk averse. That’s why socialism has been so vulnerable to criticisms that remark it is unable to cope with high rates of technological change. > >  > Overcoming this has maybe been the main goal of Market Socialism. > >  I agree that this issue is central to the debate between market socialism and CPE. However, I think you are grossly oversimplifying the process of technical change in modern economies. There are two different processes: innovation and development/application. Innovations have a great degree of uncertainty and can arise from very unpredictable ways. A systematic search for innovations however typically requires significant research costs that small workers' co-ops cannot undertake. On the other hand if they already have an innovation there is still the issue of developing and applying it. This typically also requires huge amounts of capital that cannot be borrowed from scratch. Rather small firms tend to sell such innovations off to larger ones that have the resources to materialize them. So the question is what types of economic organisations can search the space of technologies efficiently? I think it is clear that autonomous or independent research as well as production activities with a significant degrees of freedom are important factors for this search. But it does not follow that it is done most efficiently under "risk-taking entrepreneurs", indeed many successfully applied innovations during the last century did not come about this way. //Dave Z _______________________________________________ ope mailing list ope@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope

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Received on Sun Nov 2 08:30:19 2008