Question 1 What did Marx mean with his formu - University of Utah

U of Utah Econ 5080 2005fa 79
is qualitatively different from that of a construction worker. But since many construction workers could become
doctors if they spent enough time to get the education, and since the cost of this education can ultimately be reduced
to labor-time as well, it is possible to reduce this qualitative difference into a quantitative difference of more labortime.
Your second paragraph is superfluous and confusing: the question is asking about the value created by skilled
labor, not the wage paid for skilled labor.
Finally a brief remark about your first paragraph: value is not a calculation but, in Marx’s theory, it is something
real that exists out there. One can try to calculate its magnitude, but this does not make value itself a calculation,
just as the diameter of the earth is not a calculation.
Final Grading Note by Hans: All your submissions are substantial works, some of them are extremely good, and
your participated consistently. You sometimes have trouble delivering your work in the assigned time slots, and the
work is sometimes uneven. Perhaps this simply means that you do not have enough time.
First Message by Dandy is [343].
[1643] Parmenio: graded B+ So far there seems to be a consensus that skilled labor, that
of an engineer or doctor, is more valuable than unskilled labor, such as a janitor. I would
agree with what has been said on the subject so far also, the skilled has spent more of his
time learning a skill than a janitor does learning theirs, and there is a greater need for skilled
labour than there is unskilled labour.
However not all doctors get paid the same too, for instance there are doctors that live in
3rd world countries that don’t charge as much as doctors in developed countries, and the
same with engineers. I have read that there are people that charter flights to India to get a
surgery they need from the UK, they would rather pay for the plan ticket and the full cost of
the surgery in India than wait on the UK’s waitlist for a few years in which they might die.
But the skill set for the needed surgery is the same, not to mention the doctors sometimes
were trained in the same westen schools. However you might not have the same benefits, like
the capacity to sue if something goes wrong in the surgery, or the most advanced facilities
too.
We see the same with engineers, companies outsource certain engineering jobs to less
devoloped countries because they are cheaper, however sometimes the work might not be up
to par. SueGirl’s husband works as a software engineer who had to fix some program that
was outsourced [1138].
The dichotomy doesn’t have to be to underdeveloped and developed too, there is a vast
discrepancy between the doctor or attorney who lives in LA or NYC-vs-SLC or Boise. The
skill levels are the same, the facilities are the same, but they pay differently because of the
relative prices one needs to live in the areas.
Also there is a vast discrepancy for certain specialties withing a givin profession. Surgeons
get paid better than pediatricians. However in order to get certified as a surgeon you
have to get more residency training than a pediatrician, so even though the surgeon gets
more, they also had to spend a lot more time getting trained.
Hans: You are discussing how much the workers get paid instead of how much value they produce per hour.
According to Marx, these are two very different things.
Regarding the question how much they get paid, I don’t think that “there is a greater need for skilled labor”, but
instead I would say: “it is easier to depress the wages of unskilled laborers by hiring someone off the street.” Getting
a skill is somewhat an alternative to forming a union: it makes you less vulnerable to the excesses of exploitation.
(Although things seem to be changing here with outsourcing skilled labor from India.)
Next Message by Parmenio is [1860].
80 2005fa Econ 5080 U of Utah
[1649] Ace: graded A– There seems to be many contradicting answers to this question.
Tesa and Zone both think that the value per hour is the same but both have been mislead
I think. Comparing a teacher to a doctor is like comparing a high school graduate with a
student that receives a bachelor’s degree or even a graduate degree. I think that the college
graduates have the upper hand on the value per hour produced. A doctor goes to 4 to 8 years
more schooling to receive a status of a practitioner than does a high school P.E. teacher. I
have to agree with Bosox and Rudy mostly because they pulled the quote from the annotations
saying that “...a smaller amount of complicated labor is equal to a bigger amount of
simple labor.” I think that this sums it up, that someone with more training will receive a
higher wage because they are producing more value per hour. In this case the capitalist can
still pay the higher wage and still have a large surplus value at the end of the day. When the
janitor makes a higher wage that will be the day that he produces enough per hour for his
capitalist to pay him that wage.
Hans: According to Marx, all workers, even janitors, produce far more value per hour than they get paid.
Final Grading Note by Hans: You have an excellent understanding of the text. But while Marx thinks that the
contradictions of capitalism are irreconcilable and will eventually either lead to the overturn of capitalism or to a
barbaric state of existence, you seem to think that the differing interests can be harmonized. I can only wish for all
of us that Marx is wrong and you are right.
Next Message by Ace is [1746].
[1669] Fidel: In my inculcated capitalist worldview the answer seems obvious; skilled
labor definitely produces more value per hour than unskilled labor. Why else would we pay
Doctors so much money? That surface answer gives way after more consideration. We have
been trained and trained over the years to see value as price or pay. In other words “market
value” but not even the market recognizes this. A good salesmen will often earn more money
than an electrical engineer. A dock worker more than a professor.
Marx says that complicated labor “counts” as multiplied simple labor. Hans further clarifies
this by pointing out that “counts” is not the same as “is”. The “counts” is the market at
work.
In the annotations Hans explains that labor has equal value but the market assigns a multiple
to skilled labor versus unskilled labor. Capital is a critique of capitalism. Thus it is
also a critique of how the market assigns market value which is very much in contrast to
labor value. So what again is value? Value is derived from labor power. Everett remarked in
[2001fa:163-3] that “when linen weaving is done by hand it contains more value than when
it is woven by machine”.
Therefore value is the same whether it is a janitor or engineer doing the labor. It is not
the commodity they produce but the labor power that went into producing it.
Hans: The equality of labor is not an ethical principle, but it is built into the structure of a market system to treat
all labor as homogeneous with only quantitative (instead of qualitative) differences. This comes from the simple
fact that the market equates all commodities to money, which is also only capable of quantitative, not qualitative,
differences.
Next Message by Fidel is [1956].