> What generates more value - a good thought that can steer a product or a company in a better direction, or a pile of clean dishes?
The dish, obviously. A company (or a product) is an abstract concept that is largely meaningless without workers to actually provide value people want to pay for.
> Value is disconnected to the difficulty involved in producing it.
Human labor is the source of all value. If you're handing over money, it's because you're paying someone for the work they've done in some way.
> In fact, this is a key part of the free market. Precisely because it's easy for people who can do your job to produce a ton of value and hard for dishwashers to do the same, the market tries to push as many people as possible away from dishwashing and towards whatever it is that you do.
Yes, it's a lovely fantasy—but the real world doesn't work like that. The reason why I'm paid a lot isn't because I produce "value", it's because I'm really good at convincing rich people to pay me. The "free market" is just sucking off rich people with bad taste.
> Where do you get this idea?
Read Capital and get back to me. We need to open the schools!
Does the random pair of apple trees growing in a field or the stream that supplies food and water have no value? Human labor didn't produce either of these, so by your definition they cannot have any value. Clearly that can't be the case.
I'm going to assume that you're using the communist definition of value, which is a bit more nuanced, as it determines value from the amount of human labor that went into producing a good. While human labor certainly can create value, it can also destroy value, so simply measuring human labor in terms of hours cannot reflect the actual usefulness that time provided. Hitting a bike in random places with a hammer for eight hours does not produce a more valuable bike; it probably destroys the bike, and no sane person would pay a higher price for that bike. This is one of the most fundamental flaws of communist economic systems.
Contrast this with the capitalist definition of value, which is simply to measure the price one is willing to pay for a good. If the price a consumer is willing to pay exceeds the price for which a seller is willing to sell, then you have a mutually beneficial exchange. Only time will tell whether or not the seller or buyer will actually benefit, but numerous experiments throughout history have shown this to trend upward in terms of improving the standard of living for the poorest in society.
I'm quite disappointed that you're willing to lift your ideas wholesale from a French communist [0] unless of course by "Capital" you mean "Das Kapital" in which case it's the original, German one [1].
Perhaps you should broaden your horizons and read up on the theory of people who disagree with you.
Specifically:
> The dish, obviously. A company (or a product) is an abstract concept that is largely meaningless without workers to actually provide value people want to pay for.
Improving the work of 100 people by 1% is worth a hell of a lot more than a clean dish, no matter how society is organized.
> Human labor is the source of all value. If you're handing over money, it's because you're paying someone for the work they've done in some way.
I fully agree. But to say all labor is alike is wrong. Some labor is worth more. That doesn't mean the people doing it are better people. Their work is just higher quality / on a larger scale / better / faster / in the right place / at the right time / all of the above.
> The reason why I'm paid a lot isn't because I produce "value", it's because I'm really good at convincing rich people to pay me.
True, but they won't stay rich unless you make them much more money than they pay you. Do they stay rich? (Interestingly, the restaurant industry is notorious for ruining unsophisticated investors)
> Improving the work of 100 people by 1% is worth a hell of a lot more than a clean dish, no matter how society is organized.
Not if the benefits of this marginal productivity increase are hoarded by a small subset of society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ... You don't need to listen to communists to figure this out—you can just read Schumpeter.
I agree there's an issue with wages vs productivity. However:
- The decoupling is not equal for all the countries examined. For the US, wages as a fraction of GDP has been roughly steady, declining from 49% in 1942 to 43% today [0]
- We're going through major demographic changes - we have two huge cohorts in the boomers and the millennials entering different life stages in huge numbers. We're also living much longer. This will mess with asset prices and wages in weird ways. Lots of old people holding on to their assets much longer than before, and lots more young people entering the workforce all at once.
- Some of the above issues are getting straightened out. Millennials were behind in wealth creation for a very long time, but for the first time are ahead and are now on our way to become the richest generation in history. [1]
- Wealth is not static and cannot be reliably hoarded. Scrooge McDuck may have a hoard of gold coins, but real-life rich people invest their capital in (hopefully) productive enterprises. If they do a bad job, their wealth gets reassigned to savvier investors.
A common example of people trying to hoard wealth is homeowners who interfere with the free market by blocking new construction. This is going to work out great for them... until it doesn't.
As another example of capital reallocation, if you're earning good money by working for an pre-revenue startup, you're enjoying the process of capital getting reassigned to you.
> Wealth is not static and cannot be reliably hoarded.
I very strongly disagree with this—the more wealth you have, the more you can afford to manipulate society (both public and private spheres) to create favorable conditions for retaining or increasing your wealth. This is just the concept of Buffet's "moat" broadened to apply to the rest of society rather than a market segment.
> Real-life rich people invest their capital in (hopefully) productive enterprises. If they do a bad job, their wealth gets reassigned to savvier investors.
"Productive" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What actually might provide value to society and what might generate returns are wildly different things and are often diametrically opposed. Actual democratic control over the economy would yield a very different society than the one we live in, and it's very difficult to see how a capital-driven society doesn't create poverty and the long laundry list of associated evils (homelessness, illiteracy, substance abuse, widespread mental health issues, malnutrition, violence, etc etc).
Not to mention—more relevantly to our discussion here—technology's potential is woefully, woefully, woefully hamstrung by our insistence on using it to extract wealth from each other. Imagine what a smartphone could be capable of if it wasn't viewed as a profit center well outside the control of its users. Imagine what kind of internet we could have if people weren't obligated to sell ads to keep it running. Etc. This devotion to the "free market" (as if such a thing could actually exist outside of a textbook) has destroyed liberals' ability to imagine humanity's actual potential, and the demand for continual returns creeps into all our lives in the form of lower quality products, constant ads, drowning in plastic waste and roasting all summer. If the market is going to course-correct towards rational use of resources I have no clue what this would even look like.
> A common example of people trying to hoard wealth is homeowners who interfere with the free market by blocking new construction. This is going to work out great for them... until it doesn't.
The best way to make this argument will be to show when this fails (as it does, occasionally, do). Currently it's really only failing where global warming is literally washing real estate out to sea. Judging by who owns the real estate in this country—mostly, the richest generation to ever have existed and very possibly to ever exist—being a NIMBY is evidently a great way to grow your wealth. Crassus was known for making money by withholding his firemen from burning buildings until they handed the deed over. Joe Manchin's daughter makes money by exploiting an insulin monopoly at insane profit margins while people regularly have to choose between food, insulin, and rent. Etc. Markets are only able to correct these dynamics over the long term, much longer term than a human life. Hell, some of Europe's aristocracy are still clinging on to money and power that their family acquired a millennium ago for reasons completely lost to memory, and the "failures" famous in European history occur over centuries (e.g. see the Fugger family). The easiest way to make wealth is to already be wealthy.
> As another example of capital reallocation, if you're earning good money by working for an pre-revenue startup, you're enjoying the process of capital getting reassigned to you.
Of course! Trying to pass down what money I can is certainly why I took the job over, say, being a dishwasher. However, this is not an opportunity for most folks, and by any definition of making this an opportunity for everyone (not just a subset of society) is directly contradictory to the fundamentals of investment, which relies solely on using wealth inequality to drive productivity increases.
Look, all I'm saying is that investment is really useful for driving economic improvements... until it's not, at which point whatever service the invested-in thing provides should be nationalized and run at zero margin to avoid inevitable enshittification. I strongly, strongly recommend reading Schumpeter. For being the father of our industry I'm flabbergasted with how few people actually read him. It's easy to look at the 20th century and confuse the economic boom that came with industrialization and exploitation of virgin frontiers with the natural course of market forces, but the latter is coming to a close. Buckle up!
The dish, obviously. A company (or a product) is an abstract concept that is largely meaningless without workers to actually provide value people want to pay for.
> Value is disconnected to the difficulty involved in producing it.
Human labor is the source of all value. If you're handing over money, it's because you're paying someone for the work they've done in some way.
> In fact, this is a key part of the free market. Precisely because it's easy for people who can do your job to produce a ton of value and hard for dishwashers to do the same, the market tries to push as many people as possible away from dishwashing and towards whatever it is that you do.
Yes, it's a lovely fantasy—but the real world doesn't work like that. The reason why I'm paid a lot isn't because I produce "value", it's because I'm really good at convincing rich people to pay me. The "free market" is just sucking off rich people with bad taste.
> Where do you get this idea?
Read Capital and get back to me. We need to open the schools!