In reply to Ajit's OPE-L:5237:
>At 10:57 AM 6/10/97 -0700, Duncan Foley wrote:
>
>>As I said in my EEA paper, I'm not sure I'm completely happy with the UC
>>conception of the value of labor-power, not because I want to go back to
>>the labor embodied in workers' consumption, but because Marx's conception
>>of the value of labor-power has an ex ante aspect to it that my ex post
>>definition doesn't catch. (There was some discussion of this point on the
>>list a few months ago.)
>______________________
>
>Why you don't want to go back to 'embodied labor' in workers consumption
>idea? What are your fundamental problems with it?
I always looked at the value of labor-power at the point where capitalists
buy labor-power from workers for money. At this point what the workers
spend the money on is unknown, and in fact different workers may spend on
very different baskets of commodities, with different embodied labor. I'm
not opposed, however, to the idea that a socially and historically
determined standard of living may be an important _determinant_ of the
level of wage.
Cheers,
Duncan
Duncan K. Foley
Department of Economics
Barnard College
New York, NY 10027
(212)-854-3790
fax: (212)-854-8947
e-mail: dkf2@columbia.edu