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"Just labor and materials"? To read such a bold statement on HN. Human intellect and bravery are important to wealth creation. Or do we still plough the fields
by digitalengineer 13y ago
"Just labor and materials"? To read such a bold statement on HN. Human intellect and bravery are important to wealth creation. Or do we still plough the fields with a horse?
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoHuman intellect is labor. "Bravery", well, that's essentially a claim that you need Moral Virtue in order to make goods and services, which seems pretty freaking stupid.
- digitalengineer 13y agoI think you're mixing up labour with human capital. E.g. the stock of competencies, knowledge, social and personality attributes, including creativity, embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value. Instead of bravey we could call it risk-taking if that would make you feel better. You speak of "the actual source of wealth". Risks that can be rewaring or not. They require something for -possibly- nothing. An entrepeneur takes risks, does research and only when he is succesfull will he or she create value, thus wealth.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoA worker also takes risks, on a regular basis. Everyone with a freaking mortgage on their house is taking a risk. The mere fact of having a probability less than 1.0 of getting the desired return doesn't mean you've performed some superheroic act that sets you in a different moral class from everyone else. >I think you're mixing up labour with human capital. E.g. the stock of competencies, knowledge, social and personality attributes, including creativity, embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value. I'm not mixing them up; there's just very little difference between potential labor and actual labor.
- icebraining 13y agoA worker also takes risks, on a regular basis. That only means that a worker can do more than labor, not that labor is all there is.