For what it's worth, Tom, I think your essay on neo-classical assumptions, measures and prescriptions as the miserable multiplication of misery (iatrogenic) is bloody wonderful. How many of us were told, as we sat nailed to our high-school chairs back in the sixties, that we would soon be working but a half of the terrible eight daily hours then extracted from western workers? Then, it was but a foolish wrongness, engendered by the failure to locate the technical potential of technology in its social context (ie. capitalism). At least the bit about fewer hours was obviously still seen as a decisive good. Now the wrongness is a downright lie - and the bit about fewer hours, a forgotten fantasy in a world that has lost the confidence to think for itself, and has mutely given up even the eight-hour day (never mind the weekend). "It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being." (John Stuart Mill, as quoted by the big fella at the head of chapter 15 of *Capital*) Thanks, Tom! Rob.
