> Is capital more productive than labor? I seem to recall Doug
>stating that productivity of capital is in a thirty year downtrend.
According to the official productivity stats, yes. But the idea of the "productivity of capital" is problematic for several reasons. What is a unit of capital? There's no physical unit comparable to an hour of labor (and while there are all kinds of labor, you can at least average it all out), and how do you value a monetary unit of capital? How do you value the combination of hardware and software that allows me to type this at you? Does it include the university labor that went into the early versions of Eudora? Does it include Qualcomm stock at $1,000? Do we include all the Pentagon funding of (D)ARPA? Steve Jobs in his garage building the first Apple? Is all that captured in the price I paid for this computer, or what it'd be worth today (nearly 0)? And second, and not unrelatedly, capital equipment is fundamentally the embodiment of human labor - what is the machine's productivity but all the physical and mental labor went into it?
Doug