Flippanarchy

So how does it work if I spend 10-20,000 hours in medical school and then spend three minutes setting your broken bone?

Everybody would be working sooooo sloooowly....

I know that movie!

Everyone's hours would be equally valued. The problem is not every job's hours is equal.

You would have lots of people in white collar jobs, but you would struggle to fill positions like sanitation worker, oil rig worker etc.

The issue is not with currency, the problem is with capital markets and value that is not directly linked to a product or time.

A house costs a year? There's a house being built near me and it's been under construction for about a year by several teams of workers plus the owners every afternoon and weekend. (this is in Germany so it's not made of matches and paper). And that's not counting the hours needed to extract the raw materials and process them into bricks, insulation, glass, cables or pipes. There's a TON of labor to build a modern house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours

Many towns/places have tried doing that as a local currency. It never seems to stick....

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?

1. ~~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.

2. 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.

3. 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?

4. 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?

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.

Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.

Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.

Personally, I think some people's work is worth more than other people's work. If you're job involves raw sewage for example, I think you should earn a premium. Or if you're job puts the stress of life and death in your hands. Cardiac surgeons have way more stressful days at work than I do.

different jobs have different values

a doctor should objectively be paid more than a salesman

but he isnt

the salesman social engineers society into thinking hes important

he is the definition of a parasite

I do think different people, doing different things, under different contexts, will value their time differently

While i do like the dimmension of time and value exchanged via a currency, i think it fair that some labor is considered more valuable than other labor

However i do also think, that to set that reference point, there should be a pool of jobs available that pay at some set wage, that wage by definitiom setting the unit of the currency - so that when you buy something for 2 hours - you know what the meaning of that is - its two hours spent digging a ditch, or being a crossing guard, or a beaurcrat, caretaker, etc - whatever jobs are in that pool that can be fairly easily entered (and left) at any time - and who the government is charged with ensuring there are never more people willing to work than jobs available at this wage

Other jobs might pay more or less than the 1hr$ for 1 hour wage, but a person can always say "screw this, id rather dig a ditch and help my community for 1hr$/hr"

What if you had a multiplier for things like education or years of experience... You could say 2x for every year of experience or 4x for degrees, you'd still never come close to justifying billionaires

Good conclusion, bad argument.

Fun math, assuming 3 million man hours to design, test, and bring a car to production and 35 hours to build the actual car, a 200k unit run would work out to 50 hours per car.

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