Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site spar.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!whuxlm!harpo!decvax!decwrl!spar!baba From: baba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS) Newsgroups: net.politics Subject: Re: Wage Rates: Unions, Minimum Wage Laws, and Employer Oligopoly Message-ID: <63@spar.UUCP> Date: Mon, 4-Feb-85 04:30:25 EST Article-I.D.: spar.63 Posted: Mon Feb 4 04:30:25 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 9-Feb-85 06:04:19 EST References: <811@ratex.UUCP> Distribution: net Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA Lines: 39 First of all, thank you, Daniel, for beginning to post articles in something approximating conversational English. Your earlier postings were so swathed in jargon that I had assumed that your intent was to impress and to obscure, rather than to inform. On to the flak: > In a Free Economy, wage-rates are established by the Law of Supply and > Demand. At each possible wage-rate, employers will have a corresponding > demand for labour, such that the amount of labour demanded will generally > decrease as the price of labour increases; this is because > employers will hire employees as long as it pays to, and it will pay to so > long as the price of labour does not exceed the MVP (marginal value product). > (etc.) This analysis (or at least the acceptance of it as a description of a reasonable state of affairs) is unfortunately blind to the effects of technology on the value of labor. Someone has put the objection far better than I could: (quote courtesy steiny@scc) Perhaps I may clarify the historical background of the present situation if I say that the first industrial revolution, the revolution of the "dark satanic mills," was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery. There is no rate of pay at which a United States pick and shovel laborer can live which is low enough to compete with a steam shovel as an excavator. The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions. Of course, just as a skilled car- penter, the skilled mechanic, the skilled dressmaker have in some degree survived the first industrial revolution, so the skilled scientist and the skilled adminstrator may survive the second. However, given the second revolution as accomplished, the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that is worth anyone's money to buy. The answer, of course, is to have a society based on human values other than buying and selling. Norbert Wiener *Cybernetics*