Rex Kerr
1 min readApr 7, 2023

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But if you set your minimum wage to $20, then this becomes part of the cost function for the producers (assuming everyone is fully trained and there are no shortcuts to take--the LTV default--by adding it to the fixed costs). And producers are free to try to find other ways to reduce the costs (e.g. by paying more to higher-productivity employees that more than make up the difference, which LTV has trouble grappling with). MTV has no trouble with incorporating labor costs; it will just tell you that some things aren't worth making because nobody values them enough.

(Note--you said your example took into account "the underlying social relations", but it didn't. There weren't any social relations in the example, save a statement of there being a "socially necessary wage rate [of] $20 per hour".)

LTV just doesn't have any advantage save as a moral argument, and it's not a very good moral argument because either the moral impetus comes from fiat (which is no argument at all) or because it's a good model of what we actually value (but in many cases it isn't).

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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