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**Matajic** · 07-05-2007, 09:00 PM

Originally posted by Cort Haus
However, if you are deciding to make a product, you must consider your costs which will include labour time. If you are making product A, which takes 100 hours, and product B which takes 10 hours, product A has more something in it than product B. In Marxist economics, this something represents value, and while it might not tell us anything about how much someone wants to pay for it, it does tell us something about its intrinsic worth from a production point of view. Correct me if I am wrong, but Marxist theory has an important caveat with regards to this.

The problem with measuring value of something with hours spent creating it is that someone may be slacking off at his job.

To counter this problem, theory says that only (if I recall the term correctly) "socially necessary labour" is counted. And then the theory is fuzzy about this critical concept. Which renders it basically useless as a tool of economic analysis (unlike marginal utility and other neoclassical concepts).

07-05-2007, 09:00 PM	#10
Matajic Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 501 Senior Member	Originally posted by Cort Haus However, if you are deciding to make a product, you must consider your costs which will include labour time. If you are making product A, which takes 100 hours, and product B which takes 10 hours, product A has more something in it than product B. In Marxist economics, this something represents value, and while it might not tell us anything about how much someone wants to pay for it, it does tell us something about its intrinsic worth from a production point of view. Correct me if I am wrong, but Marxist theory has an important caveat with regards to this. The problem with measuring value of something with hours spent creating it is that someone may be slacking off at his job. To counter this problem, theory says that only (if I recall the term correctly) "socially necessary labour" is counted. And then the theory is fuzzy about this critical concept. Which renders it basically useless as a tool of economic analysis (unlike marginal utility and other neoclassical concepts).
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