h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Very interesting! My High School economics book profiled Adam Smith, but they didn't even mention that he was a philosopher. An interesting combination--Economics and Philosophy. Who would have thought?

I wouldn't know what MY economics book said about Adam Smith... But my teacher tried to make me know stuff about him. I slept. It was a witty retort, I know. He had no rebuttal... or if he did, I was far too gone to know a thing about it.

Of interest is the fact that, even though the followers of Adam Smith and the followers of Karl Marx are generally at each other's throats, they both saw labour as the source of wealth. Clearly this is too simplistic a picture (the standard counter-example is the mudpie which, no matter how much labour you put into it, remains worthless), but it's also clearly an important part of the picture. Labour, capital, and resources apparently all combine to make wealth, though I'm not convinced that even today anyone really understands the process. That may be because wealth is a subjective concept that necessarily involves human beings, who confound most theories.

Ah but if you construct a mud pie giving it a regular shape and form and then make sure it dries under the right conditions don't you create a brick, which does have value.

Certainly, but that brings the human element back into it. It's not the labour that places the value into the brick; it's the labour _directed towards a human need_ that creates the value. Some labour adds value; some merely creates heat.

I was never really a great believer in all of Smith anyway. But what about surely it is the labour that designed the brick, worked the case to hold the brick and carefully watched over the drying process that gave the value to the mudpie (ie brick). Also the planning that this congealed mud could make a building material which didn't envolve finding the nearest cave to live in. (I know there were the mud and wattle stage in between). All this is labour of invention casue none of this happened the first time out of the trap. After all have the chipms managed to write their Shakespeare Sonnet let alone Play yet.

All of that is true. My objection to Smith & Marx is that they are often parsed as saying

"All value comes from labour"

or

"All labour creates value"

while I think it is clear that neither one of those statements is true.

I just remember that my second year economics had one series of lectures were the second trimester was due to be on Marxism, but due to unforeseen events in Berlin and the neighbourhood it got cut to 3 weeks. A 12 week drop, do the labour of taking down a wall was of great worth to us in not having to go over Capital again.