>So an hour of the surgeon's work is more or less of equal value to an hour
>of anyone else's work.
i wasn't really sure what Wojtek meant but I assumed he was talking about the social valuation of the labor. saving lives is more valuable to society than building spreadsheet software. i'm not so sure that's true. it sounds reasonable, but what would happen if we didn't have any spreadsheet software? what would be the cost to reverting back to the old methods? dunno.
i would point out, though, that i suppose it depends on the product, if we share Woj's premise. what about the software that runs a metropolitan transit system. Right after 9-11 we landed a contract to help provide the cybersecurity for a major metro transit system. It's pretty damn complicated, relying on computing and network technologies that most of us haven't a clue about. If an engineer (usually working in a team, not alone) fucks up.... if a technical writer fails to document the code properly.... if the interface designer messes up.... if a QA analyst...
my most favorite story is that of a software security tester working in healthcare industry. these folks were responsible for designing testing software adn, in turn, designing the software that transmitted that confidential health info over the 'net for more people than you can shake a stick at.
he demonstrated vulnerability after vuln. da nada. no one cared. it was a microshaft shope. IIS is secure!
it was really clear that, if he continued to reveal vulnerbilities, showing how the software could be attacked, he was going to "make someone's day," which woulda been the end of his day. in other words, no one wanted to hear about these bugs in the software. they just wanted it to pass through the hoops, get it on the market, and worry about the risk later. if he kept making a stink against mgmt's wishes, then he'd be the first one they thought of when the software landed in the real world and really did get hacked. in other words, he'd be their first suspect. he already demonstrated that he knew what the holes were.
his only real option was to GTFO and fast.
>At 9:50 AM -0400 25/9/03, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
> >A claim that an hour of a surgeon's and an assembler's
> >work produces a more or less equal value is ludicrous on its face.
>Bill wrote:
>It depends what stage in the surgeon's career we were to measure the
>output. In the early stages of the surgeon's career, during university and
>medical school, there is no obvious benefit in terms of medical value
>created by an hour of the surgeon's labour.
>
>The would-be surgeon has to labour for a great many years before being
>capable of any surgery at all. Not just the person's individual labour as
>a medical student must be counted, but many hours of labour by instructors
>and a myriad of other highly trained support staff, all expending their
>labour for the goal of training the surgeon, must be expended before any
>obvious end-product eventuates. Tremendous labour value is concentrated in
>such highly trained specialists. The hour of the surgeon's actual trained
>work is the expression of perhaps hundreds of hours of socially-necessary
>labour that have been invested to make it all possible.
not to mention that, when you pay a hospital the bill, you're paying for all the labor that enabled the surgeon to do the hour's worth of work.
my mother told me that, when she got divorced, she looked up pamphlets feminists had written about how to value the labor of a housewife had the husband had to pay for the labor in the market. women in the 70s used the pamphlets to negotiate the divorce contract. (there was a research effort a few years ago which found that attorneys with housewives made more than those who had wives who worked. this might be because they negotiated higher salaries to start, justifying it on the basis that they deserved a higher "family wage"; it might also be because people like to hire people "like them" and will reward them for being "like them," and it might also be because the attorney with a housewife can probably put in a lot more face time than one who has to share the burden of picking up the kids from daycare, so they must leave by 5:30.
feminists--as Diane Monaco tried to point out--reminded us then that surgeons (and professionals) are also supported in the educational labors by spouses who pick up the slack at home when our professionals-in-training spend 90 hours a week laboring under our feudal model of the professional career. (see Max Weber's Science as a Vocation....) The institutional order that supports most professional career models is one that assumes someone who has other people to take care of their needs for food, clothing, clean dishes, prepared food and, often, for considerably less than were those services to be purchased at the going market rate. it assumes someone who will expend most of their energy on their careers in the early stages, rather than spreading those efforts out over years.
this all also reminds me of the complaint about the cost of merry maids. do you really think that merry maids pays it's maids 5 or 6 bucks and skims off the entire rest into their pocket? Maybe that money pays for insurance, the vehicles, the licensing, the store front, the equipment, the training of maids, the high turnover, employment taxes, benefits, utilities for storefront, bookeepers, accountants, tax preparers, HR personnel, etc. eh? What's wrong with that, if you're going to accept the premise of capitalist society to begin with. Sure, Merry Maid's and Maids International is making a "profit" but I'll bet you that their profit margin isn't that high once you factor in the cost of doing business. And what, accepting the premise of a market society, is wrong with teir model? After all, by having a business, DeLong would probably point out that the business is generating more jobs: insurance workers, government regulators, donut makers, bookeepers, tax clerks, customer support clerks, brush factory workers, etc.
kelley