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.
"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.
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.
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.
I don't like assumption 'Google'=='search engine'. There was Altavista and dozens other search engines before Google.
Work force is grossly overestimated. 99% queries could be filtered with simple encyclopedia lookup. For rest some sort of caching would be used. I think you would need about 10 000 people to constantly handle this type of load without any computers.
Yes, but it also means that Google innovation was not worth two million workers. All Google did was better results over Altavista. It is 10,000 searches a day, each search saves client 10 minutes (thanks to better result ordering), that is 70 people working nonstop.
This type of discussion is pretty pointless anyway, but since we started ;-)
I have a few comments about second article "The boat engine is worth 33500 Egyptian slaves"
First ancient Egyptians did not use slaves. Workforce in Old Kingdom which build pyramids were free men. Later it was more similar to feudalism. (BTW: women had more rights in Ancient Egypt than most women in 20th century)
Also towing is not really necessary on river Nile. There are northerly winds for most of year, so one could just use sail to travel upstream.
And third; 'Pharaoh Nile Express ' actually exist, but it had only 30 rowers :-)
The first time I did a search in AltaVista I was amazed and it really did seem like magic. Within an hour it was no longer magic and was just a nice technical feat. So when Google came along is was too late for this stuff to be magic, but they clearly did the technical feat better.
1. the worth of an innovation is relative to the previous methods available. So in your example, it would be reasonable for each of the workers to have altavista or whatever (i.e. not limited to 100 pages of google search).
2. This is more subtle: the value of an innovation doesn't vary necessarily linearly with some attribute of it. This is because an innovation has no intrinsic value - it only has value when in the hands of a person who needs it. That is, value is an attribute of the need, not the innovation. Might sound academic, but it matters when an innovation is more powerful than needed. It gets better and better, but nobody care (see The Innovator's Dilemma). In your example, oddly enough, latency really does matter (though you can imagine a certain speed where it's indistinguishable from instant for practical purposes, probably around 100ms). Also in your example, the size of the internet also matters, because the more there is, the more likely the desired answer is present, and the more likely it is to be relevant. So, this subtle point isn't relevant o your specific example, but I think it is relevant to your concept of measurement with a "scale of innovation", in general.
