| > Again, offsetting the effects of failed developments and theft is what capitalists do with profit Wait, what? I'm asking, how would you subsidize failed developments if you consider 100% of profitable development as wage. If you consider net income as wage, should the net loss be paid by the workers? > in construction, a major risk falls on the safety of the workers Which is also payed by the employer in the form of insurance. And the investment risks also totally lie on the employer here, workers just get wages. If the construction is failed/not being profitable, workers get wages and insurance, employer and investors are paying bills and credits. > what the market rewards in wages on average to two groups of people with different skill sets means the abstraction and calculation is already quantitatively done But again, market rewards have nothing to do with created values, but rather the utility of labor. If your labor could be substituted with the machinery for the smaller price. It's based solely on marginal utility of labor. No calculations based on value creation is done whatsoever, the wage is a result of a bargaining process. > measuring skilled versus unskilled labour may not be possible quantitatively > it is just as impossible as quantitatively determining "utility" But you don't need to, that's why labor theory of value is dead and Marginalism has conquered the world. You don't need to quantify utility to evaluate wages, just let people bargain based on their subjective notion of utility, ability to find substitutions etc. Marginalism is suitable for modeling and planning here, all you need is gather statistical data other how the preferences and desires for the good change with the appearance of substitutes or changes in quantity. You can't, however, evaluate wages based on labor theory of value, you can't measure the value one has added to the value of raw materials, if it's even the case. You can't even solve a simple problem of two worker's shares of surplus value with the labor theory, it's totally useless for anything but being a justification for exploitation theory. There are neither empirical nor deductive evidence that the value of commodity is proportional to the wages. Even if you exclude luxury goods (which is already a clear intellectual dishonesty, because the notion of luxury is vague, and differences between luxury and basic are impossible to be quantified of defined), you would still have a huge difference in prices of buckwheat and wheat, or water simply in different contexts (even if no labor is applied to extract it, as in the case of oasis, oasis water in the middle of desert would be evaluated more than the water being extracted from a deep shaft in a less severe conditions). Value is inherently subjective, it stems in scarcity, utility, ease of finding a substitute etc. Even labor is such a good, evaluated subjectively. |