productivity miracle or workhouse?

Tom Lehman TLehman at lor.net
Mon Feb 14 14:44:50 PST 2000


In the steel industry it's figured on the basis of man hours per ton of steel produced.

Tom

John Gulick wrote:


> >From Roach in _NYT_:
>
> >Assessing productivity on a farm or in a factory is relatively easy.
> >The output is easily measured: so many bushels of wheat, so many cars
> >off the assembly line.
>
> I have no idea what the prevailing standard for measuring productivity
> among mainstream economists is, but doesn't this definition above seem
> rather physiocratic ? What matters is not physical output per worker-hour,
> nor even physical output per worker-hour per hourly rate of pay, but
> market price of good/service per worker-hour per hourly rate of pay.
> That is, productivity measures need a universal equivalent for all inputs
> and outputs in all sectors, and that universal equivalent is exchange value,
> not incommensurable physical outputs. (Moreover, we don't or can't know
> what the exchange value of a commodity is until it actually sells in the
> marketplace, however efficiently it is produced -- "the contradictory unity
> of production and realization of value").
>
> >Nor is it clear that the
> >Internet explosion has reached the critical mass to make it a really
> >significant factor in the recent spectacular growth of productivity;
> >e-commerce, totaling an estimated $150 billion in 1999, is still puny
> >in the $9 trillion American economy.
>
> I don't have the time or energy to figure out how the following amendment
> does or might affect Roach's overall argument, but data for revenues from
> e-commerce (which includes on-line retailing) is hardly a reliable stand-in for
> data on purchase and implementation of IT capital goods.
>
> So are we to conclude from this article that the long expansion, especially
> in the late autumn of its life, is largely an artifact of highly-leveraged
> speculation in NASDAQ-type stocks (itself connected to post-97 and 98 capital
> flight from E. Asia) ? How come one sees so little in the left-liberal,
> mainstream, and business press about domestic job _loss_ as a consequence
> of the e-commerce boom (retail workers in the non-niche "bricks and mortar"
> world), w/attendant shifts in wage structure, surplus value distribution, etc.
>
> John Gulick



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