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| found a solution that seemed to make sense then. It was the exact opposite of what I think now. If maintenance consumption were recovered in pay and work products, as I now think human depreciation but not maintenance consumption is, then human depreciation instead of maintenance consumption could be exhausted in taste satisfaction! That seemed less macabre to me then. I looked for ways in which human depreciation, hardly the biological end in itself, could somehow be its measure. It was not unreasonable, I thought, to interpret human depreciation in aging as the cost of survival. The old gag says that aging is not so bad when you think about the alternative. Age-wage profiles could be explained, I thought then, as recovery of maintenance consumption rather than of human depreciation in pay. And I had those precedents from the 18" century. I knew that Francois Quesnay and the physiocrats, in Adam Smith’s time, had argued too that consumption could be recovered in earnings. Mill could be interpreted that way, in his definition of “productive consumption”, as could Piero Sraffa in a paper from 1960. I thought I was on the right track. What brought me to my senses was the thought experiment about a boss and her secretary I mentioned earlier. Picture them together at the beginning of the last year of human capital for each. The boss earns ten times as much. Human capital for each is one year’s pay, or even less in the unlikely case that invested consumption continues to the end, less one year’s discount. If pay measured work, rate of return (work/human capital) would be something over 100% per year for each. It would be even more in the unlikely case that some work remains unrealized (self-invested) until the end. Yet their time preferences measured by return to their other investments, say securities, is less than a tenth as much. This already states pretty clearly that pay covers more than work. In case there was doubt, go on to the beginning of the last day. Age-wage profiles show that pay for each is about what it was a year before. Rate of return to each is now a little over 100% per day. At the beginning of the last second, it is a little over 100% per second. At the end of the last second it is infinite. Yet the securities in their Chapter 2: Fast Forward 1/06/16 18 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010958