Shane Mage wrote: > The flawed "method" is to express costs (C) and benefits (B) in the same > quantitative units (utils?, current euros? 1990 dollars? ounces of gold?)
Isn't money, ultimately, an expression of social labor time? So, how about hours of social labor time? Don't people spend labor to obtain wellbeing? If so, isn't there a relationship between social labor time and wellbeing then? Why is it flawed to reduce the production of wellbeing to the expenditure of social labor and that alone? What is the measure of humans and their things but their own humanity, their conscious lives, their time? I'm not defending a particular set of assumptions or procedures to come up with particular cost and benefit estimates. There'll always be an error term in the estimates, because estimation is a dirty business. And I understand that in a fragmented society, the ontological divide makes it practically impossible to reconcile the epistemology of one social class with that of another. But a class struggle is precisely a struggle to appropriate the social interest. So, I'm just saying that it's silly to reject cost/benefit analysis in principle, because we humans will continue to use it, more or less consciously and explicitly to make our choices. Because there's no way around it. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
