What does inequality look like when measured in man-hours employed?

Question

There are numerous measures of inequality in income and wealth, like the Gini coefficient for instance. But I'm wondering about a different measure: the amount of labor, measured in man-hours, that is employed in the production of the goods and services that a given person consumes. Inequality of man-hours employed was clearly quite high in the United States in the early twentieth century, since rich people back then had servants, cooks, drivers, and the like, and they owned a lot of labor-intensive luxury goods. So I'm wondering what that measure of inequality looks like in the US today and in the recent past, and how it compares with the rest of the world.

Note that this isn't some metric I'm making up out of whole cloth; I think back in 2007 or so the New York Times ran a series of articles on class differences in modern America, and they said that one of the best indicators of someone's economic class is whether they have goods and services that took a lot of labor to make, or whether their daily life doesn't command a lot of human resources. And I think they said that judged in this way, class is more prevalent in American society than it might otherwise seem. So I'm pretty sure there's plenty out of data out there on this measure.

Answer 1

It appears that you've independently rediscovered a Smithian or Ricardian version of a labour theory of value. In this mode of reasoning each hour of labour is equated with each other hour of labour. Has difficulty explaining the movement of value from non-capitalised to capitalised industries and thus for differential profit.

Marx's category of "value," as in embodied crystalised realised socially necessary average productivity labour theory of value. Marx's argument is in Capital, that prices will reflect the fluctuating value component, as expressed in average productivity socially necessary labour expended in their production.

While criticisms have been made of prices reflecting values ("The Transformation Problem"), these are still under continuous debate. Begging the question on whether transformation is a problem or not, and whether if a problem answers have been supplied or not, we can use market prices to approximate underlying value.

Rich people buy more things, and more expensive things. This would be your marker of a kind of stratification class. 1% vs the rest. Marx wasn't satisfied with this.

However, the issue with using Marx for this is that Marx discovered empirically that not all labour hours are treated the same, and that the level of capitalisation (unit productivity per labour hour), personal productivity (length of the working day, fatigue), and social utility produced an "average" social labourer. We could, for example, use CPI inflation as a time series reflecting what the bourgeoisie wish to pay the average social labourer and then do time series to work out the number of units of social labourer are consumed per rich person's wealth. So it isn't an exact model: if domestic servants value productivity differs from (say) video game programmers, the price of the commodities they contribute to won't express the actual number of human hours of labour, but only the number of hours of human labour that our society (through market, production, class war) deems socially average. (Marx argues this is why Sony is more profitable than a household cleaning firm: capitalisation productivity's affects on required hours of labour).

For Marx, class is best represented by how people control and relate to social production, not what their total volume of wealth is. Wealth and class correlate strongly, but you get some useful results from relationship to production that aren't achieved in wealth analyses. Like why first world workers go on strike.