J.Devine
Years ago, Fogel and Engerman (two wacky economic historians) purported to measure productivity in order to claim that slave labor was more effective than free labor in the antebellum US economy. Maybe they were right, since the slaves clearly worked harder. But their calculation was bogus because it addressed a completely different question. The slave's productivity was measured basically as cotton (and other slave-produced crops) produced per worker, while the free workers' productivity was measured as corn (and other freely-produced crops) produced per worker. As is blatantly obvious if we leave out other crops besides cotton and corn, these two numbers cannot be compared, since they are in different units. ^^^^^ CB: Yeah , two different use-values, the products of different qualitative labors; two different commodities; "apples and oranges" uh cotton and corn. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
