you define their labour value the same was as every other worker
Sure. And then the no-show job pays as well as the guy mucking shit, and we at least pretend at equality via equitable quality of life.
But from a real analytical sense, certain tasks produce more use-value than others. Economies of scale reward individuals who can generate high volume of product with the same limited pool of capital.
i think it’s absurd for any socialist to say a coal miner should make one tenth of what someone who plays video games all day
I think its absurd to say we should still be digging coal, period.
Past that, entertainment has use value. The reason entertainment scales faster than coal mining is simply due to the cost of generating new units being relatively low.
If it makes you feel any better, entertainment has a relatively short shelf life. The value of Hasan's new content depreciates far more rapidly than the value of mining machinery or the commodities they yield.
Odds are, Hasan's career will expire within a few years. Meanwhile, fossil fuel giants will remain profitable until humanity cooks itself to death.
I meant you define their labour value in the same manner meaning workers with jobs more demanding are compensated better than those with less physically or mentally demanding jobs
Even then, if you want to talk about economic optimization, you have to distinguish between hard jobs and busy work.
i used coal mining as an example of difficult work, not as an symbol of my desire for more coal
I've seen "coal miner" held up as this kind of blue collar martyr far too many times, when the career should have been exhausted decades ago. This kind of job isn't unique. And there are lots of ways to make sure they suck less that have nothing to do with what a YouTube star does to make a living.
entertainment requiring less capital investment than say manufacturing doesn’t mean that entertainment has either higher use value or higher labor value
It's an apples to oranges problem. Weighting a lump of coal against an hour of TV content only works when you attack it from a strict market model. And even then, it boils down to this Friedmanesque view of exchange value, rather than labor or use value.
At a certain point, you're better off abandoning the view and attacking things from the perspective of a guy like Richard Wolfe. Stop asking how much an hour of labor is worth and start asking how much an hour of labor is needed. If you hit a point at which we've generated all the coal we need for the year, there's no need to keep churning it out. Then, if coal miners want to use their free time to do Twitch Streaming, more power to them. And if they can get people to shower them with gifts in the process, that's outside the scope of a central planner's purview. It only matters in the broad sense of "entertainment has value that consumers demand" and not in the granular sense of "we need to strictly regulate how much a single individual streamer can earn in order to be fair to coal miners".
Sure. And then the no-show job pays as well as the guy mucking shit, and we at least pretend at equality via equitable quality of life.
But from a real analytical sense, certain tasks produce more use-value than others. Economies of scale reward individuals who can generate high volume of product with the same limited pool of capital.
I think its absurd to say we should still be digging coal, period.
Past that, entertainment has use value. The reason entertainment scales faster than coal mining is simply due to the cost of generating new units being relatively low.
If it makes you feel any better, entertainment has a relatively short shelf life. The value of Hasan's new content depreciates far more rapidly than the value of mining machinery or the commodities they yield.
Odds are, Hasan's career will expire within a few years. Meanwhile, fossil fuel giants will remain profitable until humanity cooks itself to death.
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Even then, if you want to talk about economic optimization, you have to distinguish between hard jobs and busy work.
I've seen "coal miner" held up as this kind of blue collar martyr far too many times, when the career should have been exhausted decades ago. This kind of job isn't unique. And there are lots of ways to make sure they suck less that have nothing to do with what a YouTube star does to make a living.
It's an apples to oranges problem. Weighting a lump of coal against an hour of TV content only works when you attack it from a strict market model. And even then, it boils down to this Friedmanesque view of exchange value, rather than labor or use value.
At a certain point, you're better off abandoning the view and attacking things from the perspective of a guy like Richard Wolfe. Stop asking how much an hour of labor is worth and start asking how much an hour of labor is needed. If you hit a point at which we've generated all the coal we need for the year, there's no need to keep churning it out. Then, if coal miners want to use their free time to do Twitch Streaming, more power to them. And if they can get people to shower them with gifts in the process, that's outside the scope of a central planner's purview. It only matters in the broad sense of "entertainment has value that consumers demand" and not in the granular sense of "we need to strictly regulate how much a single individual streamer can earn in order to be fair to coal miners".