From: Tom Walker
I gave it a quick scan. It is interesting but fundamentally flawed. I say this as the one person I know of who has studied the "Luddite" myth to death. Sachs and Kotlikoff make the assumption that just about everyone makes: that machines are "labor saving". This is wrong. Machines do not * save* labor, they *displace* it. ^^^^ CB: Yes, theoretically machines are not instituted unless they reduce the number of 'man" hours per unit commodity, or replace them. ^^^^^ The substitution of fuel for labor is cost effective only to the extent that fuel is cheaper than labor. Currently, the relative cheapness of fuel results from the shifting of the social and environmental costs of extracting and burning the shit. Sachs and Kotilikoff discuss the machines as if they run on some mysterious unknown substance. Clue: 85% fossil fuels at present. Among the words that do not appear in their paper: energy, climate, emissions. I repeat machines DO NOT *save* labor. Nor do they *substitute* for labor. The consumption of fuel does that. The machine merely facilitates the substitution of (massive amounts of cheap) fuel for labor. And the fuel is cheap because it's full cost is not incorporated into its price. ^^^^^^\ CB: Even fuel cannot add new value to commodities. Only human labor can do that. Machines produce use-value,not exchange-value. Even fuel cannot fully substitute for human labor in operating the machines. As you say, there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. No matter how "smart" a machine is, it cannot transcend the laws of thermodynamics. Economists, however, believe that they can evade those laws by substituting "math" for the mechanical analogies that the math represents I won't go into a great deal of detail, having already mentioned the word that don't appear in the paper, but note the "model" employed by Sachs and Kotlikoff: The model is a variant of the standard two?period overlapping generation > (OLG) model. The production function depends on three inputs: machines M, > unskilled labor L, and skilled labor S. Note that the machines in this "production function" do not require inputs of energy! They are perpetual motion machines! Who knew? It's a good thing that the machines run on mathematical notation because if they ran on electricity or gasoline and employed transmission gears and all that shit then there would be the mathematically embarrassing fact of mechanical efficiency to cope with. Mechanical efficiency? What's that? Exactly. ^^^^^ CB: Also, importantly for capitalism, machines don't buy commodities -can't. As Walter Reuther is said to have said. "Robots don't buy cars". Human wage-laborers have two necessary functions in the capitalist mode ; producers of new exchange-value AND mass consumers of commodities without whose spending profits cannot be realized. Importantly for Marxist theory , machines don't add any new exchange- value to commodities. Human labor is the only source of _new_ value (exchange-value). Machines do produce use-value. But machines and their fuel can only add as much exchange-value as human labor put into them in making them. ^^^^^^ Here's the embarrassing part: S & K's "mathematical model" is, essentially, a mechanical analogy that "abstracts from" (ignores) basic mechanical principles. A complex machine is a combination of simple machines. The mechanical efficiency of the complex machine is calculated by multiplying together the mechanical efficiency of the parts. Mechanical efficiency is * always* less than 1. Therefore, ceteris paribus, the more complex the machine the less efficient it becomes mechanically -- that is to say the more waste heat and wear it generates. The bottom line is that S & K's paper is ecologically vacant. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
