For, if the remuneration of the workers is proportional to their efficiency
When has this ever been close to being true?
The whole argument seems very 19th century. It looks to me like Keynes sees efficiency almost in thermodynamic terms - a given amount of energy needs to be expended in production, and workers and/or machines expend this energy in a closed system. There doesn't seem to be any concept of less mechanistic work, such as salesandmarketing, which can apparently create value and hence 'product' indirectly.
(I suppose in the limit it's all entropy, one sort being physical and the other being informational. Still - there's no sense of this in the argument.)
As for GDP - it's still a simplistic argument. Keynes and other economists seem to work on the basis that because more subtle measures are difficult, we should measure the things we can measure easily and build a system of economy around them.
Am I missing something here? Because as arguments go, this seems rather silly.
Keynes and other economists seem to work on the basis that because more subtle measures are difficult, we should measure the things we can measure easily and build a system of economy around them. Am I missing something here? Because as arguments go, this seems rather silly.
"?" Isn't there more science done by deciding what to measure on purely theoretical grounds, and then pushing technology to make those measurements possible?
That's somewhat different to deciding that because it's easy to measure X, Y or Z, everything else should be ignored.
Part of the problem is that economics students will be exposed to some version of Keynes' theories, or to some other purely monetarized formulation of economics, without a discussion of scope or, even worse, with claims of universal applicability.
Yes, exactly. Which is why from the outside it looks as if economists are taught stock answers, instead of being taught to ask deep questions.
I know doodley squat about econometrics or its history, but I can tell you Keynes does discuss the issue of what to measure, what data are available to him, how they are inadequate for his purposes, etc. Maybe I should write a diary about it. The contemporary source that he talks about is Kuznets' econometric data for the US.
As a swedish kind of death points out [and Keynes also discusses] a prime source of economic data and economic concepts (as in, what can be measured) is government tax offices. Think of Inland Revenue and National Statistics, as analogous to CERN: "big science" econometrics. Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman
That's an issue of scope. As long as you don't claim universal applicability, you're ok. Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman
