[PEN-L:6280] Re: Compounding folly: the Kelvinator fetish

[knowware@xxxxxxxx (Tom Walker)]

>Tom Walker wrote:

>>Doug is not going to like my questioning of bourgeois statistics.

Doug replied:

>It's fine with me. Bourgeois economic statistics are designed to measure
>life under capitalism, and they do a fairly good job of it. They don't tell
>you anything about alienation, atomization, overwork, or ecological
>ruination. Well you can see some of that in crime, poverty, and
>environmental stats, but you know what I mean. A 4.5% rise in real GDP
>means what it says it means; it doesn't say the stock of human happiness
>has increased by 4.5%.

What I'm saying, though, is that B.E.S. DON'T do a good job of measuring
life under capitalism, by the definition of bourgeois economics. Labour
supply and wage theory hinge on treating leisure as a -commodity- not as
some hypothetically ubiquitous 'free good' like air and water or amorphous
state of being like alienation. For GDP to be measureable, all commodities
would have to be measured and accounted for. Presumably crime, poverty,
human happiness and environmental quality are not commodities. Fine. But you
can't lump leisure with those without throwing out the bourgeois political
economy of labour.

Let me repeat a quote from Enrico Barone that underlies the MAINSTREAM
conception of a "social welfare function":

"It is convenient to suppose -- it is a simple book-keeping artifice, so to
speak -- that each individual sells the services of all his capital and
re-purchases afterwards the part he consumes directly. For example, A, for
eight hours of work of a particular kind which he supplies, receives a
certain remuneration at an hourly rate. It is a matter of indifference
whether we enter A's receipts as the proceeds of eight hours' labour, or as
the proceeds of twenty-four hours' labour less expenditure of sixteen hours
consumed by leisure."

regards,

Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/covenant.htm