Labor Intensification and Value Production

Abstract

This article serves as a commentary on Basu, Haas, and Moraitis’s (BHM’s) analysis of labor intensification. While endorsing the ramifications of BHM’s differentiation between labor’s capacity to process inputs into output per unit of time and labor’s capacity to create value per unit of time, I augment the discourse by introducing two supplementary considerations. First, it is erroneous to directly extrapolate the outcomes of the one-sector model to those of the n-sector model. Second, the impact of labor intensification can be scrutinized through an alternative lens by relaxing the ceteris paribus assumption. JEL Classification: B14, B51, C02