Greetings Economists, Michael P writes, the idea is that productivity in services cannot rise as fast as in commodities. The classic example is that it takes the same labor to perform an opera, but a movie of an opera can service many more people.
Doyle My understanding of this point 'that the same labor performs an opera as performs a movie' is that we are talking about the distribution network and how it works. What I mean is that an opera or a movie is usually meant to be one to many product. So distribution is one to many. Most of the commentary about such intellectual property has to do with the cost of making copies and distributing copies, but what I wonder about is the network properties of the labor. An opera or a movie usually is looked in the labor process as a blend of the community in the performance. To take that within the context of a file that could be distributed, a few gigabits of size that remains roughly one to many in the conventional business sense. Suppose I thought about the network properties a little differently. For example, if I make music with a laptop with garage band loops I could build a sympathy myself. Suppose I distributed the music? And someone else performs something with the music also? So I contribute to the network a file size roughly equivalent to an opera file which mimics the communal structure of the music? And then the communal structure takes that file and does something with it also. The network structure is many to many. The file size starts out increased, and increases once it is in the network. That's a model of IT increasing the productivity of the individual in the network structure. That would impact wages in such a network. As productivity increases the wage per unit opera files size units would fall because the product increases per unit of labor. thanks, Doyle
