Yes, but ftr, there’s already a film with this premise.
Some 2010’s pseudo-thriller with Justin Timberlake that had a super generic name like “On Time” that I can’t quite remember. I don’t know if it’s any good, because one really stupid line from the trailer I recall “4 minutes for a cup of coffee?!” with the most lackluster delivery still lives rent free in my head, and I couldn’t bring myself to watch it lol
It’s a good film, the premise is enough to make it good honestly. As films go, it could be better on all fronts, but they got their message across: That billionaires control all this shit extremely thoroughly, to the point that a society based on this mode of currency can never get better. Because as soon as living standards might improve for anyone, prices rise across the board to keep people where they are. And that poor people are deliberately kept devoid of choice so as to keep them poor, no matter how hard they work.
It occupies the exact same category as ‘Elysium’ in my mind - cool setting with an amazing and insightful premise. And an… average execution. I can enjoy a film like that better than the other way around.
I mean spoilers but
they eventually rob whole banks and realise that’s not enough close to enough, that the issue is systemic. The writing then fails a bit because they still think the answer is just one big heist away.
Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat features a planet like this that was initially governed by a computer. Such a good series, highly recommend as anarchist entertainment.
So how does it work if I spend 10-20,000 hours in medical school and then spend three minutes setting your broken bone?
I’ve played around with this idea, and the best solution I came up with was amortizing hours spent in training over the course of a career. If you spend 20,000 hours in med school, and you have a projected career of (40 years × 2,000 hours per year) 80,000 hours, one hour of your labor would have a value of 1.25 “unskilled” hours.
Yeah but that doesn’t really work because it still treats all the hours as fundamentally equal which just isn’t true. It may take someone 20000 hours to become a doctor with a particular skillset, but that doesn’t mean ANY person can do that. Person X may never, regardless of investment of time, be able to obtain a mastery of that skillset. Moreover, for things like surgery you’re talking about the stacking of hours for regular education, med school, specialty, residency, and then surgery. Each of these is a threshold that increasingly fewer people can cross.
It seems that reasonably the best thing to do is to award additional value based on scarcity and necessity of profession, but you might just back yourself back into capitalism I guess? At the end of the day I can dig a ditch but you can’t fix your grandfather’s heart so that amortization is not a very satisfying split.
Everybody would be working sooooo sloooowly…
I strongly disagree (given this system is fleshed out a lot more, obviously). This is the bullshit they sell us at the top of corrupt systems.
I work slowly sometimes because I don’t earn a fair wage. Fifteen years ago, I earned a fair wage and I put extra time in that I didn’t need to. Today, I do the opposite. This is because my employer today is untrusting, abusive, and exploitative.
I have several questions for the Marxists in here, because i like the idea of this, but there seem, to me, to be some very serious issues with the labour theory of value as it has been presented in the comments and elsewhere I have seen. Can y’all help me understand?
Skilled Labour(Solved): As others have pointed out, of course, skilled work takes multiple thousands of hours of education to be able to succeed. While I don’t necessarily claim that this makes a Doctor worth more than a Custodian in the same hospital, I, as an educator, must ask: if the educators who educated the doctor got paid in hours of value, where did the value of those hours come from, if not the future labour of the doctor? Those thousands of hours to train the doctor are what allow the doctor to perform the labour, and so the cost of the doctor’s labour must be higher, just as the value of a porcelain bowl must necessarily include the labour of the miners who quarried the Kaolinite, the labour to transport the kaolinite to the kiln, the labour to produce the fuel which fires the kiln which bakes the Kaolinite, etc. Training is labour, so the value of the future labour of those being trained must marginally increase for every hour spent training. In order to calculate the value of that training labour, therefore, must we not estimate the value of all the future labour of the doctor, then divide it over the expected course of a career? Is it possible for someone to go into “training debt” by choosing a career for which their training is not utilised? (For instance, if a person trains to be a doctor, but then chooses to become an artist instead, all of those hours spent educating them to be a doctor have been paid out to their educators, but they will not utilize that training, so does the value of that labour retroactively diminish, or is the student liable for the lost potential labour?) Is there some better framework for calculating the value of training labour?
Proposed Solution: Pay the Teachers and their Students as they work through the training. The additional value of the doctor’s future work is not paid out to the doctor, because that added value is the value with which you pay the teachers and students, and thus the doctor’s future payment remains the same, because it was already paid out to them and to their teachers, during the period of time they were training.
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Perverse Incentive of Technology: In a theory of value where the value of a thing is in the labour required to produce it, improvements in technology, which increase the efficiency of a process or otherwise reduce the amount of labour required to produce something, appear to me to have an inflationary effect. Technology makes each thing require fewer hours of work to produce, making each marginally less valuable. This means that, if a producer were to hide their use of technology, and claim they used more hours of labour than they did, this would cause the value of the product to stay high. As long as no outside auditor watches and times every step of the process, efficiency improvements are incentivised, not because they allow labour hours to produce more, but because minor, unreported improvements in efficiency can be capitalised to produce profit. In fact, the entire concept of labour value calculations requires impartial auditors at every step of every manufacturing process, otherwise there is an incentive for fraud, claiming that things required more hours to produce than they did.
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Labour with Increased Risk: Some labour is, inherently, more dangerous than others. Time is not always a factor in safety. From literal risk of bodily injury, to risk of infectious disease, to the risk of malpractice. How do you incentivise people to go into professions which carry greater risk without making their labour worth inherently more? The custodian at the hospital carries a significantly greater risk of suffering infectious disease —and losing the opportunity to produce value— than the custodian at the museum of natural history. From a simple cost-benefit perspective, the increased risk to the hospital custodian effectively increases the “costs” of doing that labour, as it carries with it the negative expected value of lost future productivity due to illness. Does the hospital custodian, who accepts greater risks to do what is otherwise a similar job, produce greater value per hour worked, as both jobs are necessary, but the hospital job has a lower value for the worker per hour worked, due to the expected cost of risk?
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The Auditor: Ultimately, who decides the Value of every product and service? In order for a Labour Valuation to work, we must ensure that value fraud is impossible (or at least very difficult and must carry with it severe disincentives if discovered). Who audits the declared valuations? Who does the calculations for expected value of training? Who establishes regulations to ensure quality of products and services, and how do they measure efficacy? But, most importantly, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who determines the value produced by those who audit value? Who determines the number of auditors that are necessary, or redundant? How do you ensure that there is no corruption amongst the auditors?
My understanding is that “To each according to their needs” is the Marxist perspective. No need to determine value.
So then what’s the point of the labour theory of value? Why do we need to use hours of labour as a measurement of value?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for gay space communism, as long as it can work. I’d love to live in a money-free society, and just take basic income to do what I love: teaching science to others and exploring it more deeply myself. I think that “to each according to their needs” is an admirable baseline, but how do you convince people that it’s worthwhile to buy into that, since it would take serious buy-in from the vast majority of people to make it work (otherwise, the coffers of the state will be empty, and you get mass death)
Personally, I’d be fine with a state takeover of every industry, then turning everything into a worker co-op. Of course, as a public educator, that’s already how it works for me, but my sector could use stronger unions and the right to strike (in my jurisdiction, neither of these are present)
The post wasn’t made to suggest this analogy as the solution but rather as a thought experiment to demonstrate the evil of money hoarders. Once enough of us recognize the evil and farcical nature of capital then we can work towards a solution.
LOL. Some people’s 1 hour is worth more than other’s.
Are you going to pay them 1.5 hours for each hour worked?
If only there was a way we could keep track of how much value people earned in an hour of work.
The low-value jobs you’re talking about are essential to the basic functioning of society. That is your food, water, and sanitation. If they stopped doing those jobs, you would die within days or weeks. What you are saying, essentially, is that you think those jobs should be done but that the people who do them should be poor.
In November, Business Insider estimated the average Walmart worker’s yearly salary at a paltry $29,469. The outlet observed that McMillon’s compensation as Walmart CEO was more than triple the 295-to-1 ratio in 2014.
“CEO Doug McMillon was the second-highest-paid CEO in this list with a compensation package worth $27.4 million — a pay ratio of 930:1,” Business Insider said. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich (@RBReich) has frequently highlighted the problem on social media.
So let’s say the average Walmart worker works 2,000 hours and earns 2,000 hours. Let’s say the CEO worked 6,000 hours (working every waking hour of every day of the year, minus 7 hours for sleep). By this ratio, the CEO earned 1,860,000 hours. To put that in perspective, the average worker “earned” 83 days, while the CEO “earned” 212 years.
Can you explain what exactly the CEO did that made his work hours THAT MUCH more valuable than the average worker? Link to source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/walmart-ceo-sparks-backlash-report-024000016.html
