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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26886 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Or rather, there is high demand for her labor in particular, meaning labor alone is not just a source of value, but depends on other factors such as skill, and consumer demand.

I'm not sure you can separate it quite like that. You can boil the current demand for Taylor's labor down to the results of the previous labor (voice training, practice, focus groups, marketing, etc). Or, really, the 3 hours spent at a concert isn't the only labor being sold, it's the cumulative labor that was required to create that concert.

Which would explain why skilled labor pays off so much more than unskilled labor. A skilled laborer is selling the labor they spent training over and over again, whereas the unskilled laborer only sells the labor they are currently preforming.

Once you introduce enough of these factors and mutate your "labor theory of value" to be robust and accurate and account for all of this and related factors... you just have normal economic beliefs

This is kind of what I was trying to get at towards the end of my post. It really feels like you could boil down all of economics to any of the inputs, as you can generally convert them to each other (if nothing else, then by converting to money first). Not entirely sure how useful it is at that point though.

and aren't a Marxist anymore

It's possible I should have been more clear and direct, but I was talking about LTV in the abstract, not specifically about marxist principals. LTV is also associated with Adam Smith.

I, personally, think Marx's ideas were disastrous, but not really because of LTV. I think they were disastrous because they tend to destroy very important incentive structures which end up destroying most of the value in a society.

LTV, on the other hand, seems like not that bad of a take for someone operating in the mid 19th century (and a pretty good take for someone operating in the late 18th century like Smith was).

LTV, on the other hand, seems like not that bad of a take for someone operating in the mid 19th century (and a pretty good take for someone operating in the late 18th century like Smith was).

It was bad take even back then. A common counterargument used was that of literal gold digger during Gold Rush who lucked out and struck gold vein on his very first day. It is easy to understand example showing that value is created by demand as opposed to some "unit of labor". Of course there are other example of where value is created by some cosmic luck besides finding mineral riches or ancient treasures buried underground - ideas being another prime example. A lot of transformative scientific or product ideas were invented randomly or as a byproduct of something else, they are product of talent and circumstances. LTV was dead on arrival.

I think it's like half of the puzzle. Or maybe slightly less. It's almost equivalent to the "Supply" half of "Supply and Demand". Which means that it's ignoring demand. A pizza rotting in a warehouse takes the same amount of labor/talent/capital/ingredients to produce as a pizza in a highly popular restaurant. Lots of Soviet failure stories involve factories producing tons of unnecessary items that ended up unused because they were being measured according to oversimplified metrics. Tiny nails when measured by quantity produced, gigantic nails when measured by gross weight. Food rotting in warehouses instead of being distributed because someone forgot to care. You can make two products with nearly identical amounts of labor, skill, and ingredients, and have wildly different output value based on which of them is actually needed by the people around.

In a sufficiently competitive market where there are lots of fungible inputs, lots of people who could perform the same tasks, lots of customers who want whatever is produced, and the outputs themselves are mostly fungible, then yeah, the price of goods will drop down to approximately the price of its inputs, which can convert to labor. Which basically says that if you simplify and fix Demand as a constant, and fix all of the non-labor parts of Supply, then labor is all that's left. It's an important component, and certainly better than having no economic theory whatsoever, but you need to actually satisfy customer desires if you want to actually create value.

I think that's only because you're only focused on Marx's side of theory.

Smith's theory is about the labor the buyer is willing to expend to obtain something. To quote the wealth of nations:

The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.

Which, I think is the other half that you're missing.

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