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But what if you can organize a carpenter company such that it can do twice as much construction work as before? Does that not give you two houses whereas before

But what if you can organize a carpenter company such that it can do twice as much construction work as before? Does that not give you two houses whereas before you had one? Why should you ascribe value to the first house, but not the second, when they are identical goods? What you do here is assign zero value to productivity changes. If a change in productivity has zero value, then the value of the original productivity has zero value as well. The only way to claim that a person who makes carpenters more efficient is worthless is to claim that carpenters are also worthless.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
bena 17y ago
There is a natural limit to the amount of work any one body can do. Sure a "carpenter company" can make more houses than a single carpenter in a given time span, but that is because they employ more than one carpenter not through some magic business efficiency. But I'm also not arguing what you want me to argue either. I'm not saying that "leveraging synergies" is worthless, just that it is worth less. If we are to ascribe value to production and utility, those who can do are the top of the heap.