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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (22559)	12/6/2004 3:20:34 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23153

The reason a piece of land is worth something is because someone can spend time on it to extract the metals contained within it, or to plant fruits on it, or to build a house upon it. Otherwise that land would be worthless. Similarly, the reason a piece of pottery is worth more than raw dirt is due to the time spent on it by the potter. Time is the essence of wealth creation, but everyone's time is not of equal value. This should be an obvious fact of life and I don't know why you see it as "finessing" the issue. In the pre-industrial era, we did not have enough food or clothing. Time spent on creation of such products was well spent and valuable. Furthermore we had little use for scientists who were mostly patronized by kings to satisfy curiosity (or worse be a show piece). Stephen Hawkins would probably not have been a celebrity. On the other hand, today the time spent on creation of a shirt is minimal and readily available (it is not hard to find someone who can spend time on operating simple manufacturing machinery). The complexities of modern life however mean that a good CEO can sell his time at much higher relative price. It is all about supply and demand be it a rock star or a pub singer or farmer or whoever. I am not persuaded by your reduction to "breath", although at some point I considered arguing all my living expenses should be tax deductible as otherwise I would not be able to earn money <g>. But the fact remains that people who pay me could not care less if I am breathing or not. What they care about is what it is that I am doing with my time and is that piece of my time worth the price. The significance of this outlook is that the value of this "time" spent on an outcome is a function of supply and demand. The people who are complaining about the loss of manufacturing jobs or agri-jobs or whatever, are really saying that nobody is willing to pay for their time as much as used to. The obvious solution is for them to spend their time on more worthy activities, but of course this is not so simple. The communications revolution with Internet as its most obvious manifestation is a truly disruptive technology. The difference this time around is that whereas previous advanced technologies gave a huge lead to their creating nations, this technology has an equalizing effect and on relative basis is helping developing nations more than developed nations. It is not just the manufacturing jobs that are at stake, from back office accounting to reading X-rays and MRIs, if the worker does not have to be physically present, then the job can be shipped to the cheapest producer. Ironically this means that the kid who is mowing my lawn may have greater job security than you or I. Sun Tzu