(1) On the notion of productivity and the contribution to society

[This is a part of a series of entries loosely connected]

In none of my contributions my notion of productivity was as primitive as the criticism suggested. What I meant was not physical output; rather I was talking about the contribution to the community, productivity in terms of welfare improvement for all. I do not think that it is possible to talk about ‘labour value’, but I do indeed think that there is something like a ‘just wage’ (gerechter Lohn) – an old concept, that sheds light again on the fact that distributive justice is a question of economic concern. The question is merely: how does the distributive mechanism work? What does a just mechanism look like? Here Rawls and other philosophers may help us out. In the end however it’s a social contract, and that contract should be signed by all – as I argue below, a condition that is hard to satisfy in reality and puts an especially heavy burden of responsibility on the ‘elite’.
But I will not go down that path of ‘unscientific’ philosophy (even though a market is a highly social construction as well and therefore far from ‘neutral’, ‘natural’ or ‘scientific’ – even though economic theory I would argue has been sold to the public in a way that was overly mysterious and made it look like a science. For a review of this point with regard to the monetary system, refer to G. Ingham: “The nature of money” (2004)).
Rather, I’d like to point out that there are strong hints that our current measures of welfare as well as personal success are highly problematic. Prof. Hans Diefenbacher talked his work on the construction of a replacement for GDP and its growth as an indicator how ‘well’ society is doing – note again, that ‘well’ implies here that economic activity should serve people, not the other way around. Other measures such as the HDI or the HPI, price and value basic needs and a healthy environment stronger than economic or monetary success indicators today.
What does this have to do with our lawyer problem? Let me be very plain and naïve here: it might be possible to think of a society where money is not the main driver in the search for justice. It may be that the locally Pareto optimal outcome between the lawyer and his client is socially suboptimal – how the math works out is a question of the definition of the measure used. And it can be argued that the measures are just wrong: nobody ever showed that u’ > 0 and u’’ < 0. On the contrary, happiness research, behavioral economics and
psychologist come to very different – and much more complicated – conclusions.

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