THE GENERAL CASE

The formalization of labour and productivity set up in Chapter 8 permits the precise presentation of the logic of the properties discussed in Chapter 7, in cases more general than those where labour is representable by a quantity or duration (possibly adjusted for differences in other characteristics) and output is proportional to it, which were the focus of Chapter 9. This is the topic of the present section, whereas Section 2 comes back to the case of unidimensional labour, but with a general production function, a case which will find an application in the treatment of involuntary unemployment in the next chapter.

The solution

Individuals in number n indexed by i each have a labour denoted as a set ℓi of chosen characteristics. Individual i working ℓi earns pi(ℓi, where pi is her production function. We have pi(0) = 0 (ℓi = 0 means that there is no labour: its duration is zero and the other characteristics are undetermined).

The obtained distributive justice consists of the equal sharing of the rent-rights in given productive capacities, that is, of the value of the production functions pi(). The value of these functions consists of the fact that they yield both income for labour and leisure for the labour necessary for obtaining a given output or income. This distributive allocation can only be in terms of the goods considered in the problem: income (or consumption goods) and leisure.