> Seems like replacement cost derives from the value
> of capital goods in production, which in turn derives
> from the value of output to consumers. So can we
> conclude that the prices of consumer goods are a
> "reasonable proxy" for the value of final output?
Yes, at least for the purpose of comparing categories. This is what I meant when I said I was abstracting from any discussion of the relationship between values and prices. Are they actually? That's a whole new can of worms.
> Or that, putting income distribution aside, prices
> reflect consumer preferences?
Whatever consumer preferences are. CP is a term devised by desperate neoclassicals to try to give some meaning to their empty price theory.
> Can utility theory
> and market socialism be far behind?
>
They are for me, Max (so far behind they are out of the picture, that is).
> If the Army Corps of Engineers builds a dam, aren't
> they productive labor?
>
Labor is productive if it produces surplus value for a capitalist. So unless the dam is a commodity owned by capitalists to be sold on the market to extract that surplus value, then no, such labor is not productive in the marxian sense. Productive is not a synonym for, e.g., efficient or useful.
> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
> . . . Marx explicitly included that as
> part of labor's subsistence needs. It doesn't matter if the education is
> provided for by gov't through taxes.
> >>>>>>>>>>
>
> Isn't there a timing issue with including education
> expenditures as variable capital in the year spent?
> Since the contribution to subsistence happens over
> a future period, it can't really be subsistence in
> respect of the current period. (One could 'subsist'
> for the moment with somewhat less of it.) If a kid
> goes to school for 21 years straight, how can all
> intervening expenditure be "subsistence"?
>
This is something I hadn't thought about. If you divide subsistence into physical and social elements, education/learning is a social need, both as to increasing labor's productivity, and as to the social development of the person within the social relations of capitalism. Schooling is a primary source of the capitalist socialization of the individual.
My premise was that education/learning is a consumption good, the benefits of which are absorbed at the time of consumption. You learn how to take pencil and paper and make symbols as a way to communicate with others. You don't actually use this skill in service to capital yet, you're still in the first grade, but I don't think that is the point. There is a need for social development that is satisfied, I think, at the time of consumption, i.e., the absorption of learning. And that is part of the social subsistence of labor.
A paranthetical: learning, of course, may not be productive to capital, but the also opposite, depending on what is learned.
> Finally I'd like to echo something I think came
> from Henwood -- that the cost of reproducing productive
> labor is a concept exceeding squishy. Whatever standard
> of living people will settle for seems pretty malleable,
> once you get past biological subsistence.
>
As I responded at the time, the BLS used to publish an urban family budget index that captures to a remarkable degree Marx's concept of social subsistence. This is how the BLS described, in 1948, what they intended to measure: "The budget therefore should represent the necessary minimum with respect to items included and their quantities as determined by prevailing standards of what is needed for health, efficiency, nurture of children, social participation, and the maintenance of self-respect and the respect of others". I don't know about that efficiency part, but that's pretty good, and done by a grey gov't agency to boot. There are similar numbers out there, though perhaps not as good, so reasonable estimates (which as all we are talking about because we are dealing in the distribution of huge aggregates) aren't that hard to come by. And lefties have to make more use of them in discussing distributional issues, instead of using that bogus official "poverty" number that is always trotted out as if it were meaningful.
Roger