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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

Measuring labor-saving devices by how much labor they save is a great idea. But, how would you apply this to things that don't augment or replace human abilities? (Eg, spacesuits.)

Edit: It just hit me, a spacesuit sitting on a shelf has absolutely no value. Only when used for something does it have worth. So, since the biggest practical purpose of spacesuits is keeping people safe while they fix things in space, the labor worth of a spacesuit is the cost of building a robot to replace it and the human inside it, minus the cost of the human.

If the spacesuit is being used to so something a robot could do better, (like, say, hold a camera steady in orbit) then the labor value of the spacesuit is negative.

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"Measuring labor-saving devices by how much labor they save is a great idea."

This is called the "labor theory of value" [1], and dates back to Aristotle. It was useful for agrarian economies but misses some crucial points, and so modern economists generally don't consider it all that useful. Adam Smith's work (which later became classical economics) was largely in reaction to shortcomings in the labor theory of value.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

The LToV is a failure as a normative claim about how much things "should" cost (edit: or, indeed, a as a descriptive claim about what we can expect things to cost).

It's an eminently fair metric in the context the GP was trying to use it for, which was to estimate the relative benefit to consumers (something like the "consumer surplus") compared to other innovations in other times and places in order to gauge relative progress esp. in saving labor.

Well, Google isn't generally thought to replace human abilities. And fast transportation isn't either, yet with both you can reduce those things to human work. See my follow-up to this: http://herdrick.tumblr.com/post/45193590173/the-boat-engine-...

But spacesuits... hmm. That is really tough.

Sure, spacesuits are part of the process of an Astronaut entering space. The Astronaut is part of a Space mission. The Space mission is part of may experiments on exploring the universe. The experiments conducted on the exploration of the universe lead to some results that have impact on earth. Those with impact on earth might lead to tangible innovation. These innovation might make it into definitive products. The products are measurable my monetary dimensions.

Yeah sure, with enough dedication you can measure anything and everything. But if it makes sense is another question.

I think even pg put in one of his more recent comments the question forward how innovation should get measured. And the answers were (at least for my taste) very, very limited.

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