John, The binary productiveness analysis deals with the physical input into production. A driver without a truck can only carry what he can carry on his back i.e. very little. The lorry without the driver can carry nothing= . Together (plus road, gas etc) they can carry a vast amount.
Look, Rodney, no one is arguing that the truck makes the worker more productive. But that description, which no one disputes, links truck and driver. You wish to dissassciate them, and assert an "independent" productivity for the truck. How?
Now consider an automated lorry (i.e. which works without a driver -- such things are conceivable and there are certainly driverless trains). In this=
situation there is no driver yet there is a very considerable output. How do explain that?
There are no such "automated" systems, and never could be. If there are, I would ask you to point to one. The automated train (and the are largely automated) still is connected to a network of controls operated by humans.
As you know, binary economics points out that the conventional productivity=
concept shows increasing human productivity rising and rising until it shoots up to infinity -- or collapsing to zero! That happens becasue conventional productivity wishes to attribute everything to labour and not understand that the driverless truck (which works by itself) is really just=
a machine doing all the work by itslelf (plus road, gas/petrol etc).
Can you show me some production not attributable to humans? The human power can be, and generally is, multiplied by machinery by many orders of magnitude--again, no one disputes this. But things do "produce themselves"; there is no "independent productivity."
The Las Vegas dam has administrators and maintenance people but that does NOT mean that those people do all the work. It only means that they do SOM= E of the work. The rest of the work is done by the weather (which puts water=
into the sky and causes rain); gravity which causes the water to flow downhill: concrete which causes the water to rise behind the dam: the flow=
of water then turns the generators generating electricity. And yet you would wish to attribute all this to the humans?
Again, you insist on attributing to others views they have neither held nor expressed. The dam neither creates nor operates itself. This is obvious in the budgets for the dam. Have you ever seen an enterprise with zero labor cost?
You say that if humans withheld their work the telephone/internet system would not work. Yes -- and if the telephone/internet system did not exist you and I would be reduced to shouting across the Atlantic.
Exactly. You use the connective AND: the people AND the system. This destroys any notion of "independent" productivity. From your own words, the idea fails.
Could I try a little physics example? If you push on a wall, the wall pushes back becasue you, and it, remain in balance. That is basic physics.=
Now you and Keith would deny that the wall pushes back becasue you would sa= y the wall has no volition. And yet the "pushing" happens even if no humans are involved e.g. tables are pulled down by gravity and the floor pushes back so that they remain in balance. I would be fascinated to read your response on this. And maybe Keith could respond on it as well.
Binary economcis does not assign all the benefits of the mined gold to the owner of the mine. And it does not say that the man who ploughs the field does all the production and can claim all the benefit. The FIELD (helped b= y the sun etc) does a large part of the production -- it's the non-human capital asset playing a big physical part in production. The man does not do it all.
Really? Norm will find this interesting. Then who, besides the owner of the mine, enjoys the profits of the mine?
I am well aware that the telephone system was originally built by humans. But they have been paid for their work and the ownership of the system -- which continues to work productively every day -- has now gone to the present owners. As you know full well, binary economics proposes the wide,=
rather than narrow, ownership of that productive system and other systems.
You say that binary economics is small and fractious. The only fractiousness occurs with people who are unwilling to make a complete commitment to wide ownership (and who, all the time, find excuses for not unequivocably supporting wide ownership).
Which seems to be everybody, but the small and fractious group of binarians. Further, the idea that only those opposed to wide ownership disagree with the bianarians simply isn't true. The Binarians battled with nearly everybody on the COG list, *all* of whom were committed to wide ownership.
I am urging that you try this experiment: drop "independent productivity" and tell me is *anything* in Binary theory needs to change. And if it doesn't, why hold the theory. But if it does, then you have a real problem; you have something as essential to your theory which is never seen in the real world. ISTM that you loose either way. Wouldn't it be better just to drop this theory and get on with things?
John C. M�daille
"A dead thing can go with the stream...
but only a living thing can go against it."
-G. K. Chesterton
http://www.medaille.com/distributivism.htm
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