123hop at comcast.net on Sunday, January 23, 2011 6:24 PM wrote:
>
> And the point that hand-made clothes are of much, much higher quality than
> sweatshop-made clothes is not to be dismissed. There's an overall,
> long-term efficiency thing going on here (both in terms of natural
> resources and human time) that you're all missing.
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The average labor time required to produce per product is a (or the) measure of value created in the product. Hand-made clothes contain more labor time and should have higher quality measured in terms of value created. The caveat, however, is "provided the laborer in question is an above-average skilled and the textile material employed is above-average in quality."
If, by efficiency, you mean savings per product in energy (both physical and natural energy resources) and money (or capital) invested in the production process, compared with large scale production, then it remains an open question.
Capitalist mode of production, generally speaking, is superior to guild mode.
Mark