I'm taking that into account. HDTV's, laptops, iPods, etc, don't take many man hours to produce. My point was that the man years of labor necessary to support a comfortable, modern standard of living are actually quite few.
sure they do. esp when you take into account inventing and bringing to market all the sustaining innovations (making hard drives smaller, better screens, software, etc. -- plus the operational overhead of coordinating all these millions of people's effort) needed for your iPod, laptop, etc. the number of man hours is staggering.
Per item produced, the man hours are not that staggering. Here's my back of the envelop calculation:
A laptop costs about $1,000. Assume a $15/hour wage. That's about the average for most the electronics producing world, and it represents a balance between the wages of the engineers and the wages of assemblers. Make the generous assumption that 100% of the cost is labor. That adds up to 66 hours of total labor for my laptop. I probably own about $3,000 worth of goods total, and have no desire for anything more. That's about 200 hours of total labor - or 5 months. That will easily last me 5 years or more.
