> At 04:30 PM 08/05/01 -0700, Ian wrote:
>
> >And what of pages 690-703, not to mention the rest of that book?
With
> >the exception of Condorcet, it's arguably the first stuff written
on
> >non-linearity in economics.
>
> No objection. I was just trying to pare it to the ab-so-lute minimum
for the
> sufferers of eye strain.
> Tom Walker
> Bowen Island, BC
> 604 947 2213
==========
Well it's cool that you brought those sections up because I've been
suffering through the 7-27-2000 US Congress Budget Committee hearings
on Intergenerational Economic Issues. Specifically the testimony of
Laurence Kotlikoff, and the whole issue of increasing capital per
worker ratios seems to imply some maximal limit to attentional
processes in the productivity of information [for example, lines of
code written per hour by programmers etc] in the 'new economy' we hear
so much about--bear with me. Kotlikoff is saying in his testimony that
raising US tax rates now would be better than starting an
intergenerational war over various social insurance policies given the
complexities of labor productivity and real wage rates. The paradox
is, what incentive will workers have to raise productivity if it's
gonna be grabbed by the tax man to pay for old folks? Nay, the problem
may go deeper; what incentives do firms have for greater capital
investments if they can't be sure of greater output per worker,
especially if the 'symbolic analysts' are already pushing the limits
of their output [caffeine and all night programming marathons and all
that]. In that sense, who cares about Pentium 7 chips if it's gonna
frazzle and burnout knowledge workers even faster. Wonder what Marx
would've made of speed limits to info production per unit of time?
Just musing,
Ian