Julio: >>> How would you act if your life were >>> infinitely valuable? How would others act?
Me: >> Absurd? Julio: > Try and answer my questions above to see the utter absurdity of your position. I guess my prose is really bad, because Julio doesn't understand what I wrote (and thus does not know that I already answered his questions). To repeat myself once again, he does not understand what "my position" is: (1) if the system for doing c/b analysis were democratically legitimate, I can see how my life does not have infinite value (so that people would not act as if my life were infinitely valuable); [*] (2) if I am making a choice _for myself_, my life is clearly not of infinite value (and in practice, I do not act that way); and (3) if _someone else_ (e.g., Ford or some other bureaucratic organization) is making a choice _for me_ about the value of _my_ life, my life should be treated as having infinite value, since that is neither a democratically-legitimate decision nor one that I make for myself. Instead, it is a paternalistic imposition of someone's else's values on me. As I said before, the "value" of _anyone's_ life depends on one's _point of view_, just as opportunity costs always depend on one's point of view. It is not an objective truth. We can't ask the veritable Man in the White Coat for the objective scientific value of my life. He probably thinks that his life is worth more than mine, by the way. In very simple (if pleonastic) terms, if Ford executives had to drive Pintos to work every day, they would assign a different value to human life in their c/b calculus than in the actual case, where the people driving the cars were anonymous peons. >> if things went right, they (Marx & Engels) >> would reject the idea that labor is the >> only measure of opportunity cost. Among >> other things, there's the environmental >> impact. > Costs and benefits are, ultimately, social labor but with a different > algebraic sign. The "environmental impact" is costly because, given > the state of technology, undoing the damage it entails to us takes a > huge amount of social labor. Given the state of technology, producing > goods such as clean air, fresh water, pristine land, a decent global > climate, etc. is extremely expensive in terms of social labor. As far > as we know, the rest of nature doesn't reflect on itself the way we > humans do. Focus on the word "algebraic." When we're talking about a communist (truly democratic) society making a decision, it's unlikely that costs (not to mention benefits) can be quantified in the way where we can talk about algebra. The world's costs (e.g., the destruction of the polar ice cap) do not have a scalar number attached to them except in a social context. The obvious way to attach a value to that destruction would be in terms of the human lives lost (forgetting the polar bears), but that again poses the question of what human life is worth. That depends on the social context. 1) In the context of a market (commodity-producing) society, there is an obvious way to attach numbers and thus to add things up, say, the market cost of reversing the destruction to attain the desired result. Some items -- such as human life -- have no market prices (since absent slavery, human lives are not for sale), but in theory at least, we can assign shadow prices to them. Usually, we think about the "value of human life" in terms of (a) the cost of production of a human-being (of a given age, in a given country, etc.); (b) the present discounted value of that individual's expected future incomes; and/or (c) the amount an individual is willing to pay for life insurance.[**] One fact jumps out: in a capitalist society, rich people are more valuable than poor people. They cost more to produce (expensive prep schools, etc.); they expect to earn higher incomes (because they can choose more lucrative jobs); and they are more able to pay for insurance. So when people talk about the "value of human life," they're talking about some sort of average. You've got to admire this covert egalitarianism, but since these calculations are done on a national level, it still leaves the value of a US human life as higher than a Haitian one. This should not surprise us, since markets attach the comparable values to human beings as they do to machinery. If a human is worth $200,000 and a Pinto is worth $10,000, that says that a human life can be traded for 20 Pintos.[***] Absurd? not in a market-dominated society, especially a capitalist one. After all, ownership of capital gives an individual the right to to claim some of the labor of others (surplus-value) for free. A pile of corporate stock (say, two shares of Berkshire Hathaway) is worth a human life. 2) Well, what about the mythical world of "simple commodity production" (SCP, which some Marxologists say doesn't even show up in CAPITAL)? In that case, there is no surplus-value and so labor-values correspond to prices in equilibrum. In that case, the shadow price of a human life might be less crazy. Maybe we should do an experiment and set up this kind of society (which is similar to the money libertarian's utopia) to see what happens. (That would require a revolution, BTW.) In theory at least, this society would be much more egalitarian than capitalism, with income differences being due mostly to differences in individual skill and effort (as in the money libertarian's utopia). Then, we might assign shadow prices to human lives which aren't totally biased in favor of the rich (since that class of people wouldn't exist, except in very small way, say due to scarcity rents). But there's another problem. Values do not correspond to the amount of labor that's used to produce things. Rather, it's the social necessary abstract labor-time that defines value. The "abstract" part is crucial. Simple commodity production does not have the same mechanisms that capitalism has for taking abstract labor-time out of the realm of theory and putting it into the world of practice. That is, there's no capitalist drive to simplify labor, breaking it down into the littlest pieces and making it homogeneous, reducing skill levels, etc. Braverman's story in LABOR AND MONOPOLY CAPITAL does not apply. In practice, labor would be still concrete labor. Well, many Marxologists don't see deskilling as required to make abstract labor real. Rather, under SCP, what's important is the value = price of what an individual concrete labor produces. That defines what's socially necessary and labor "proves" its abstract content in the exchange of its products. 3) But what about communism? there, presumably, there would be no market prices. Instead, all prices would be shadow prices (prices theoretically attached to items). In that case, there's no way to use market prices to infer shadow prices. So what's a communist society to do? How can we attach values or prices to the large variety of concrete labors that occur in the real world in a society that does not imply an obvious metric (market prices)? As I said in my first missive (in reply to David Shemano in this thread), shadow prices could be generated by maximizing some sort of social welfare function. If all of society's goals can be aggregated in a single function and we know all of the input-output relationships among all of the concrete labors and the large number of items produced (and we have a big enough computer), we can assign shadow prices to all of the labors and all of the goods and services. The problem with this is that (as economists know), a democratic process cannot be summarized by any kind of "social welfare function." The process of democracy is just not that simple. (Think of the voter's paradox.) So we cannot talk about shadow prices, except those that are provisionally attached by technical workers. Even then, democracy requires choice: a communist society would involve choosing between alternative aggregations (based on alternative social welfare functions), not going along with just one of them forever. People would be choosing among different proposals, with more than one value of human life involved in each of them. Note that even though labor will likely continue to be done under communism (but see William Morris, NEWS FROM NOWHERE), if I am right here, it would be incorrect to talk about values because no market prices would be assigned to either labor or the products of labor. And no Braverman-style deskilling would be occuring. It's capitalism which homogenizes the world, reducing everything to a single market metric. Communism would instead celebrate heterogeneity. My computer's not working right (it keeps on jumping to the start of this e-mail), so I'll stop here. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. [*] In theory, this could be approximated by c/b analysis that employs Kant's categorical imperative. Again, is there a philosopher in the house? does this make sense? [**] I was told years ago, by a friend who currently writes a column for the NYT, that these three numbers are very similar, but I doubt it. [***] Would anyone commit suicide if the beneficiary of your choice could receive 20 cars? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
