>I take the point that there are different ways of looking at the
>labour reduction problem. It could be the costs of training that drives
>things (the Hilferding approach) but this is not very practical for
>empirical work. The approach which takes wages as the indicator of
>labour quality is tractable, since wages are observed in various types of
>data. Both approaches can be defended on textual and theoretical grounds
>but one of them is more suitable for empirical research. Correct me
>if there are studies which have modelled the Hilferding approach
>empirically.
>
Paul C:
I would agree that for empirical work in capitalist economies one is
driven to use wages as an indicator of labour quality for reasons
of simplicity. But this should not blind us to the fact that by doing
so we incorporate systematic biases due to sexual and class discrimination
in the labour market.
Paul Cockshott
wpc@cs.strath.ac.uk
http://www.cs.strath.ac.uk/CS/Biog/wpc/index.html