Gene Coyle wrote: >This unnamed correspondent thinks we, the workers, are expressing preferences for long hours? > >> >Alas, this problem seems unlikely to be solved - paradoxically, for the >> >same reasons why the opposite problem of motivating couch potatoes to do >> >something useful with their lives will be unsolved. It is just too hard >> >to change people's preferences - though, on the other front, Madison >> >Avenue seems pretty good at that. Yes. It's the standard neo-classical argument, by the way, going back to Jevons with a convenient detour around the conveniently repressed Chapman. That's why I think Chapman is sooooo important. "Return of the repressed" and all that Freudian jazz. They tend to alternate that with the quasi-fixed cost argument from Walter Oi, which is on even more shaky "theoretical" grounds. Believe it or not Oi "based" his quasi-fixed cost analysis on John Maurice Clark's analysis of the social cost of labour. He says so at the end of the article. But somehow he managed to leave out precisely the social cost component of the quasi-fixed cost. If you redo the math including a variable for social cost of labour you come up with the opposite result -- as did JMC. Shorter hours reduces the "quasi-fixed" costs! There only "fixed" ceteris paribus! And ceteris doesn't paribus. regards, Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/covenant.htm
