Regarding the paper at http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/jeffrey_sachs.pdf,
Tom Walker wrote: > 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. What do you mean by saying "displace" instead of "save". I would think that machinery reduces the amount of labor time needed to produce a commodity. As Marx puts it: " Like every other increase in the productiveness of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities, and, by shortening that portion of the working-day, in which the labourer works for himself, to lengthen the other portion that he gives, without an equivalent, to the capitalist. In short, it is a means for producing surplus-value." > ... > 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. Human power is very expensive, and most human work isn't power intensive, instead it depends on human decision making. > ... > 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. Modern computers are very complex, but consume little energy. > The bottom line is that S & K's paper is ecologically vacant. The paper is just proposing a simple solution to a complex program. Basically, the idea is to tax the savings of old people which would put their retirement years at risk and transfer it to the young who don't want to work or get an education. -- Ron
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
