Young Master Smeet
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Stuart, late of this parish, as found a good article:http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/10/a-nobel-for-planning.htmlSome of the articles linked to are very detailed, so not for the layman, but overall, the post makes the same point we do. We need to find some way to publicise this stuff more…
Let's not forget, one of the reasons for crisp packets is the common law of duty of care and vicarious liability: they provide a high standard of hygene and food protection (so greens who complain about food packaging have to answer how we can get round such measures).Admittedly, Alan's roadside vendor sounds more like what I was talking about, people would make and give out crisps (and otehr food), but, perhaps not on a street corner all day. It sounds like an obscure subject, but within such microscopic events lie macroscopic questions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem
Quote:The Gale-Shapley algorithm involves a number of "rounds" (or "iterations"). In the first round, first a) each unengaged man proposes to the woman he prefers most, and then b) each woman replies "maybe" to her suitor she most prefers and "no" to all other suitors. She is then provisionally "engaged" to the suitor she most prefers so far, and that suitor is likewise provisionally engaged to her. In each subsequent round, first a) each unengaged man proposes to the most-preferred woman to whom he has not yet proposed (regardless of whether the woman is already engaged), and then b) each woman replies "maybe" to her suitor she most prefers (whether her existing provisional partner or someone else) and rejects the rest (again, perhaps including her current provisional partner). The provisional nature of engagements preserves the right of an already-engaged woman to "trade up" (and, in the process, to "jilt" her until-then partner).However, I fear our own Assistant Secretary has refuted this:http://en.nothingisreal.com/wiki/Why_I_Will_Never_Have_a_GirlfriendAlso of interest is linnear programming:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_programming
ALB wrote:How would calculating the labour output of human labour power be any less easy than calculating the "erg output of human labour [power]"? "Labour output" cannot simply be counted by time. To calculate it you'd have to reduce all the different types of skilled labour to amounts of simple labour. I'd prefer to have a go at calculating erg output !Well, each worker would put out different quantities of ergs (we could, perhaps, do rough approximations). Complex skills can be, systemwise, reduced to simple labour, since we'd count the training and labour power being put into training as well, which implicitly adds to the overall system cost. We wouldn't need to count the output of labour power, just its raw usae. It would be imprecise, but useful. I suppose an averaged out erg per human could do the same job, I'd have no problem with that.
ALB wrote:You seem to be assuming that all inputs might be in short supply but surely the basis of the socialist case for non-monetary calculation is that they won't be. Some might. Then the engineers calculating the "optimal" way to produce something would have to take this into account. I can't see that this would involve a "massive computational difficulty". I thought that this is what Robin Cox's "law of the minimum" was all about.The law of the minimum could help, but the difficulty is looking three or four products down the production process, unless the engineers explore every product back to the beginning of its supply chain, they might commit themselves to stressing a scarce resource indirectly.
ALB wrote:Incidentally, have the two people who have just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics anything to contribute here? I read that one of them has devised a scheme for matching those who need a kidney with those prepared to offer one. I assume money isn't involved but you can't be sure because this is an American scheme. But if it's not, maybe they deserve the prize for solving the question of Who Will Live on Richmond Hill in Socialism. Those who want to and need most to, rather than those who want to and can pay the most.Stephanie Flanders (who she?–Ed.) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19954671
Quote:You don't need a Hale-Shipley algorithm to help you allocate different kinds of television sets to different households. Soviet planners had a crack at it, but we know that price signals in the market do it much better. We buy the television that best fits our needs, subject to our ability to pay.But doctors will be thinking about a lot of different factors in choosing a hospital – and vice versa. Money is only one consideration. And, though you can debate whether people should be able to buy or sell their kidneys, in most health systems around the world, the authorities will want the scarce number of kidneys to be allocated on medical grounds, not financial ones. That is where matching theory comes in: it can help fill the gap, and create a kind of market, where you might have thought none could exist.Mr Roth helped New York City redesign its system for allocating children to public school places. Using his algorithm led to a 90% fall in the number of students who ended up in schools that they had not even included among their five listed preferences. Now cities all over the US use some form of Mr Roth's algorithm for allocating students to schools.Does the forum software allow threads to be closed? This could be another alternative to banning, closing a thread that is getting fractious is quite common elseplace…
ALB wrote:Young Master Smeet wrote:It would be a useful measure of the total share of the social effort an activity was taking in (and thus could help us balance out between branches of industry), as well as performing a transferable measure that could allow up-chain transmission to avoid technical choices being made at one end that stretch capacities at another.No doubt, but why single out labour-power as the special case? It's only one of many inputs and in principle no difference to the other inputs (materials, energy). I'm not suggesting this but I believe the Technocrats in the 1930s suggested that accounting be done in "energy units". What I'm suggesting is that calculation in kind doesn't require any general unit, not labour-time nor energy units. We calculate in amounts of all the different elements involved in production, just as now under capitalism, only in socialism it won't be duplicated by a calculation in money and won't need to be by any other general unit ("universal equivalent").
Well, I'd suggest two good reasons.1) Only Labour occurs in every product (yes, all products contain energy, but calculating erg output of human labour would be quite a feat).2) Because what this is about isn't a general unit of equivilence, but a human centred approach to the social organisation of production, starting with the people around to do the work.
ALB wrote:Young Master Smeet wrote:As for Zeitgeist, economic efficiency is not the same as technical efficiency, as I demonstrate in my example above, what might be the most technically efficient way of producing X might in turn actually lead to excess drains on resources further down the line.If some material is in short supply or needs to be used sparingly for some other reason, this is something the engineers can factor in to their calculations.
As per the standard ECA, though, such calculations would involve massive computational difficulty (as well as following the suppy chain of thousands of inputs for the simplest product. Whilst the engineers might have the time to do that, a signal between products can save that considerable effort.
ALB wrote:The problem with labour-time accounting is that it is not possible to measure the intensity of work (labour) nor to calculate in advance what labour is "social necessary" (nor, I would add, to work out how much more "simple" labour skilled labour is "worth"). Marx pointed this out in his criticism of various schemes for "labour-money" that were put forward in his day. Unfortunately, he didn't apply this to the "labour-time voucher" scheme he gave a sort of blessing to in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. The only way something like this would work is, as you suggest, if you measure "labour" by time spent at work. In other words, actual labour or, actually, hours put in at work. I'm not sure that this would be a useful measure of much.It would be a useful measure of the total share of the social effort an activity was taking in (and thus could help us balance out between branches of industry), as well as performing a transferable meaure that could allow up-chain transmission to avoid technical choices being made at one end that stretch capacities at another. As with Robinson Crusoe, we know the numbers of humans available, and how much time they have to work, the intensity of that work is, at a certain point, irrelevent (that is a question for wage allocation, not productive co-ordination). As for Zeitgeist, economic efficiency is not the same as technical efficiency, as I demonstrate in my example above, what might be the most technically efficient way of producing X might in turn actually lead to excess drains on resources further down the line.I agree that recording concrete labour types could be useful as well (but would require more effort, and relies on fixing some fairly blurry lines between types of labour).
So, would some sort of labour-time accounting be viable?Firstly, we'd need to be clear that we wouldn't be trying to use the "true value" of products, that only emerges from commoddities in exchange. We'd be measuring the concrete labour employed (so, that would mean, for one thing, we'd be measuring real labour actually used, rather than averagely necessary time — so far as we could accurately record that). Actually market prices work much better than any labour value scheme could (Kautsky's rather neat refutation).Once simple refutation of trying to use true value is Joan Robinson's in her essay on Marx, where she shows that because of relative rent, you can't use labour time as an exchange value (basically, one field might take ten hours to produce a tonne of wheat, whereas another would take twenty, the wheat would then sell at the value of the least productive field that can be brought into operation, under market conditions: subjective/marginal theories of value are similar to this, as they treat all goods, effectively, as a m,onopoly of themselves).If, however, we simply record the total time to collect the aggregate social stock of wheat, then this objection no longer matters. Wheat took a sum of the social effort (which can be expressed in person hours or as a percentage). We would simply record how much time was spent at each prodfuction unit (not the time per unit of oiutput). We needed be hyper accurate about that: if a unit is slated to have 100 hours worked, it doesn't signify much if one person takes an afternoon off, since rough inaccuracies of that sort would balance out.This is not a call for labour voucher exchange, although knowing what the per capita share of the output would be would help socialist citizens to "budget" their consumption. Vouchers are unnecessary, since if there is a roughly agreed working week, then most people will have the same number of vouchers anyway, it becomes an unnecessary burden to distribute them. Whereas the labour burden of time accounting would be relatively light, and could assist in the statistical clearing houses.If we find, in the early days of socialism, an incentive to work is needed, then a simple "I turned up to work this week" voucher system could be used (just as, in revolutionary Spain, for example, a union card was used for bus transport).With aggregate concrete labour time, we could plan at a world and scoiety level, and predict any changes required by any large scale infrastructural project, while regulated stock control would be the experience day to day.
Partly, I was trying to also look at the individual experience, as I don't think it would be a case of just taking what you want off the shelves (and many objectors certainly would stop listening if we say that), so having a money-behavioural replacement.While the law of the minimum does seem to offer some sensible measure, Cox seems to skate round the need to make production decisions. So, we can talk about inventories, and responding to changes, but when it comes to big projects and budgeting for them, it becomes a touch trickier.To take his example of X, and it's two inputs A & B, we can further assume that they have two inputs each C,D & E,F. Further, lets say they have two inputs each G-N. (That is A=C+D+G+H+I+J & B=E+F+K+L+M+N). Say we opt for the production method that spares A, as that is scarcer than B. But on examination of the supply chain, it turns out that N is much scarcer than J. If we want to be even more complex, we can ask what happens (as is not entirely unreasonable) if, say, J and H are the same thing (assuming C=G+H and D=I=J), thus choosing to spare B would mean we'd be committing ourselves to a big hit on H/J.The law of the minimum would indeed mean that at each stage we used the most available resource at each stage. We could apply the logic of flocking birds (each agent only responds to its neighbour, thus producing an overall efficient effect). Our argument then would be not the most efficient use of reousrces, but that at least there would be a workable.If, though, there were some way of communicating cumulative impact, then the problem would be resolved. It would look like oprice, excepting that no exchange of commodity or negotiation would be invovled.
Ozymandias wrote:…was later allowed to chair an impossibly obtuse and highly intellectualised evening talk about Shakespeare which would have sent your average worker in the street fleeing in utter boredom…. that Shakespeare dreck….I believe you mean "abstruse".Summer school, to my mind, is about more detailed and difficult talks than a run of the mill public meeting. A great many workers are interested in Shakespeare and history, and the actual subject of the meeting, ideology and its workings, is sufficently difficult that an approach through something as tangible as a scene in a film is a useful way of introducing it.
well, six and a half thousand out of all the Unison members in Higher Education (some 50,000), so pathetically low turnout and then a wafer thin majority.This demonstrates, incidentally, the power of one of the Tory anti-union laws. They have a rule against 'Unjustifiable discipline' which specifically precludes expelling union members who don't strike (even when a legitimate ballot has been held). So, I could get expelled from the union for striking unofficially, but the minority of rejectionists have just exercised a veto.I'm actually pretty upset about this, we've just voted to have our own throats cut. Management must be laughing.
Adam, yes, I thought the underconsumptionism the lesser evil, I think the myth that Marx didn't write about communism is a greater ill (followed by the "No one is proposing doing away with capitalism").
If anyone wants to write to the BBC with a comment about the programme, the web form is:https://faq.external.bbc.co.uk/templates/bbcfaqs/emailstatic/emailPageYou're limited to about 500 characters.Stephanie Flanders twitter is: @bbcstephanie (for those who wish to tweet).
robbo203 wrote:So just to be clear – you are saying in effect that a socialist administration would take over the running of capitalism until such time as the socialist movement everywhere had captured political power and socialism could be introduced simultaneously on a worldwide basis. Is that right?Actually, my preferred option would be to allow a minority Capitalist Party to govern, with the socialist majority wielding a veto: but I think that would be a hard sell. The lesser option would be to introduce radical democracy: annual elections, abolition of posts of prime minister, cabinet, etc. (the full Pennsylvania 1776 shebang) to precisely avoid substitution but without trying to tinker with capitalism but instead drawing up plans to introduce production for use. That way we could not return to the previous status quo, and can hang on until the world movement has sufficient strength to make the decisive change.
Quote:I’m not quite sure what you are on about here. ” Breaking the link between labour and return outright ” in the sense that there is no quid pro quo set up is precisely what is meant by “generalised reciprocity”.Well, in the sense that work becomes an end in itself rather than a means to a personal end, which it remains if it is in any sense reciprocal.I think the own kill rule contrasts with chiefly feast giving, indeed as precisely a means of preventing that sort of gifting (and ultimately potlatching).
