Journal D+iz+a+n+k+Meister's Journal: Fresh Air
Ahh, a breath of fresh air!
I just read this comment by gmhowell, and I am, for the first time in a long time, filled with hope for the current progress of ideas.
Marx may have been many or all of those things, but at least a concession is made for, what I believe, to be the main problem with capitalism:
All value of a good stemming from the input of labor
is, at the very least, an arguable idea.
The only account of this idea I have ever read was by David Schweikart, who is a prof. somewhere(not a lot of info on google). His argument starts out with a classical example:
O(x,y) = P(x) + Q(y)
where x and y are factors of production and O(x,y) is the ammount of whatever produced using x ammount of factor x and y ammount of factor y. Let x be labor and y be land, and pretend that you're farming corn.
Assuming economies of scale, the ammount of corn produced by 1 unit of labor is P'(x) and the ammount of corn produced by 1 unit of land is Q'(y). Thus the equation can be rewritten as:
O(x,y) = xP'(x) + yQ'(y)
So there is a clear distinction between the contribution of labor and the contribution of land.
The next question is: What is the contribution of the owners of land? And then you make a few logical connections about the ethics of compensation related to contributions made to production, and it is quite clear, at least to me and David Schweikart, that the owners of any means of production contribute nothing to production soley through the act of ownership.
Basically how is the equation:
O(x,y) = xP'(x) + yQ'(y)
affected by increasing or decreasing the number of owners of y?
It seems to me that it isn't, therefore ownership is not a productive activity, thus not entitled to compensation from production.
David Schweikart goes on to make more arguments for cases that more closely resemble the real world, but this example for the classical case is the starting point.
Are there any other thoughts out there on the contribution of labor vs the contribution of owning a means of production? Or do you think that I'm just out there?
Note: I'm condensing 10 pages into a few paragraphs from memory. The main thing to consider is Euler's theorem as the most politically charged mathematical theorem in history.
I just read this comment by gmhowell, and I am, for the first time in a long time, filled with hope for the current progress of ideas.
Marx may have been many or all of those things, but at least a concession is made for, what I believe, to be the main problem with capitalism:
All value of a good stemming from the input of labor
is, at the very least, an arguable idea.
The only account of this idea I have ever read was by David Schweikart, who is a prof. somewhere(not a lot of info on google). His argument starts out with a classical example:
O(x,y) = P(x) + Q(y)
where x and y are factors of production and O(x,y) is the ammount of whatever produced using x ammount of factor x and y ammount of factor y. Let x be labor and y be land, and pretend that you're farming corn.
Assuming economies of scale, the ammount of corn produced by 1 unit of labor is P'(x) and the ammount of corn produced by 1 unit of land is Q'(y). Thus the equation can be rewritten as:
O(x,y) = xP'(x) + yQ'(y)
So there is a clear distinction between the contribution of labor and the contribution of land.
The next question is: What is the contribution of the owners of land? And then you make a few logical connections about the ethics of compensation related to contributions made to production, and it is quite clear, at least to me and David Schweikart, that the owners of any means of production contribute nothing to production soley through the act of ownership.
Basically how is the equation:
O(x,y) = xP'(x) + yQ'(y)
affected by increasing or decreasing the number of owners of y?
It seems to me that it isn't, therefore ownership is not a productive activity, thus not entitled to compensation from production.
David Schweikart goes on to make more arguments for cases that more closely resemble the real world, but this example for the classical case is the starting point.
Are there any other thoughts out there on the contribution of labor vs the contribution of owning a means of production? Or do you think that I'm just out there?
Note: I'm condensing 10 pages into a few paragraphs from memory. The main thing to consider is Euler's theorem as the most politically charged mathematical theorem in history.
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