>
>Mat says
>
>>Justin sez:
>>>The other limit is time. Human effort is itself scarce in the sense that
>>>each of us can only put out so much of it in our limited lives, so that
>>>if
>>
>>this is the penultimate neoclassical position underpinning the notion of
>>"opportunity cost." (I'm not saying that is Justin's purpose or position,
>>just
>>that "time" is the ultimate scarce resource for neoclassicals.) Even if
>>nothing
>>else were 'scarce', the fact that when you are doing one thing you are not
>>doing
>>something else means that 'decisions have to be made'--decisions about
>>'allocating' scarce resources among alternative uses, or 'competing ends.'
>> It
>>is often presented as a Robinson Crusoe story. Lionel Robbins is the
>>classic
>>reference.
So? Does that make it wrong, just because the neoclassicals believe it? Or
maybe you are somehow constituted so that, although your life is limitred,
you have infinite amounts of time to waste, so it's no skin off your nose if
you have to spend your working life doing something unpleasant that is also
no help to anyone else.
>
>Perhaps, Justin thinks that our current disposition toward time (= the
>ultimate scarce resource that imposes upon us a duty of constantly
>calculating "opportunity costs" as if it were a categorical imperative) is
>not a historically bound & transient one specific to the capitalist mode of
>production; but I believe that we won't have the same disposition under
>communism. Under communism the proverb "time is money" won't apply.
>
Well, I guess I don't believe in communism: I am a market socialist. I certainly do advocate reducing the working day so we have more time. I find it interesting how my essentially Marxisn point about taking care not to waste our time was transposed into a charge of neoclassical Gradgrindism. But this is my point. It is a fact of the human condition, indeed, a result of human nature as mortal, that we do not have infinite amounts of time. There are, therefore, opportunity costs with respect to time. Time I spend, yes spend, doing work I would not otherwise do because I have to make a living I cannot pass, or use otherwise. Therefore it would be a crime to organize the economy so that people have to do more of that soirt of thing than necessary. Moreover, if the effort is pure waste, if it does not benefit society, then the result is a dead loss. This should be avoided if it can be. The economy should not only minimize "necessary" labor, but it should make sure that this labor is _really_ necessary. Do you seriously disagree with any of this?
Maybe it is because I am getting older that at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near.
Yours mired in bourgeois ideology
jks
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