Arthur Chu, Jeopardy champ extraordinaire, tweets:
"Capitalism made your iPhone"
No, LABOR made your iPhone. Labor makes things under any -ism. The -isms just determine who gets paid
He's right that "-isms", in econ terms, are about distribution of resources (though he should broaden his definition of resources to include control, not just payment).
But is he right that "labor made your iPhone"?
Consider the following two situations:
A) I make fire by rubbing two sticks together.
B) I make fire by using a butane lighter.
In both of these situations, you can say "labor made the fire". But in the first situation, there was a lot more labor for the same amount of fire. Saying only that "labor made the fire" leaves out this important fact.
Now suppose I want to make fire with no tools. No matter how much labor I apply - the labor of millions of people over millions of years - I will not be able to make fire.
So saying that "labor makes fire" also leaves out this important point - the necessity of having tools.
Labor is a necessary input into producing an iPhone. But there are other necessary inputs - machines, buildings, land, natural resources, vehicles, tools, etc. And labor is not a sufficient input for making an iPhone - without the right tools and the right organizational system, no amount of labor will get the job done.
But didn't labor "make" the machines, buildings, etc.? Since labor is necessary to create any intentionally produced good, you can say "Labor is what makes everything" if you want to. But you know what else is necessary to create those goods? Electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. So I could reply to Arthur Chu by saying "Labor didn't make your iPhone. Physics made your iPhone." Now who's right?
The basic point here is that our language, and our intuitive way of thinking about causation, views everything as perfect substitutes. A + B = C. If A + B = C, then you can determine how much of C is due to A, and how much is due to B.
But in reality, things are only partial substitutes. You more often have stuff like
(A^a)(B^b) = C. When you have complementarity, it doesn't make sense to ask how much of C is due to A, and how much is due to B. But we always do it anyway. Arthur Chu's tweet is one example. The slogan "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is another example. A third example is the perennial debate over whether humans have "free will."
(A^a)(B^b) = C. When you have complementarity, it doesn't make sense to ask how much of C is due to A, and how much is due to B. But we always do it anyway. Arthur Chu's tweet is one example. The slogan "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is another example. A third example is the perennial debate over whether humans have "free will."
Our intuitive concept of causal attribution is simply wrong and useless in most cases.