>>> seamus2001 at home.com 08/05/01 09:22PM >>>
========== 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,
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CB: Who formulated the concept of diminishing returns ?