3 Body No Problem
Well-known member
What do you think of this? Do you think that the amount of labour hours used in the production of any given object affects your valuation of it? What if we compare the value of two identical goods (Good A and Good B), where Good B requires (for whatever reason -- produced in a country with lower total factor productivity, e.g.) twice the amount of labour time in its production. Is the value (to consumer or producer) different? Is labour value some sort of ordinal measure, or is it more concrete?
I don't know what you mean by ordinal here. The consumer cares about the price. The price does not talk (directly) about labour input. But labour input matters to producers, and the producer will reflect that cost of labour in the cost of the product. Hence, indirectly, the consumer is affected by labour input.
But the amount of labour input depends on the product. Consider the following two examples.
- 1 hour consultation with a lawyer.
- A gambling contract: a random number between 0 and 10000 is generated. If that number is below x, the other party pays you $1000000, if it is equal to or above x, you have to pay $1000000. Clearly that contract involves the same amount of labour, regardless of the choice of x, but the price you would pay to play this game depends totally on x.
These examples indicates one devastating critizism of the LTV, that it does not take into account the element of risk in economic transactions.
The second -- and more well-known -- critizism is that with complicated goods, it seems impossible to talk about the labour input of a product without references to prices of other goods. What is the labour input in the work of a pilot, say, who has to go through years of training? In simple, agrarian societies, there is a somewhat stronger connection between prices and labour input. On the whole Marx analysis makes more sense when one understands it as an analysis of a very peculiar form of capitalism, not of capitalism as such.
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