Responding to Sean Andrews: This is a red herring. The issue is not whether Jobs creates wealth by himself or outside of a network of social relations. No one disputes that that an Apple product, like a pencil, is the product of widely dispersed knowledge contributed by a multitude over generations, and the product would not exist without the contribution of each. Instead, the issue is the difference between what lawyers call "actual cause" (i.e., but-for causation) and "proximate cause." The fact that a software engineer working late one night to solve a key problem and a pizza deliveryman who delivered a pizza to the engineer that night might both be "actual causes" of the final product does not mean that the contributions are in any way meaningfully comparable, so we can say that the engineer's contribution was a "proximate cause" of the product while the pizza delivery was not a proximate cause. In this sense, when we search for the primary "proximate causes" of Apple products, Jobs stands far above the rest, because (1) as a matter of historic judgment, his contributions were relatively greater and more important than the contributions of others, and (2) Jobs, the individual person, was unique and irreplaceable, while all other contributors, as individual persons, including Wozniak, would have been replaceable.
David Shemano "The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded into the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clan. Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a Zwon politikon[3] not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society – a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness – is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other. There is no point in dwelling on this any longer. The point could go entirely unmentioned if this twaddle, which had sense and reason for the eighteenth-century characters, had not been earnestly pulled back into the centre of the most modern economics..." _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
