> Ah... My drop zone has been entered. That is the mistake of the
> classical economists or the mistaken interpretation of the classical
> economists. Vakue is __**MEASURED**__ in labor because there is no
> such thing as a "util". The error is in claiming that value _IS_
> labor. READ THIS:
>
http://www.greatervoice.org/essays/LaborTheoryOfCost.php
Where, and by whom, is value measured in labor? In every economy I know of
it is expressed in dollars or some other unit of currency. Trying to
translate values thus expressed into "labor" either (1) assumes the labor
theory of value, or (2) is attempting to covertly promote it.
Your cited essay comes closer to the mark by focussing on labor as a
component of cost, rather than of value. But it still errs by assuming that
all costs are reducible to labor costs, or at least that labor has a pre-
eminent place as a component of cost. Labor is a major cost component for
some goods, a minimal one in others, and a negligible one in still others.
Value, in contrast to cost, is not *measurable* in any units, whether units
of labor, utils, or dollars. That is because value is not quantifiable.
There is no substance or property common to all economic goods which can be
measured and expressed in units of any kind. The value of a good is not a
cardinal number; it is an ordinal number only. The dollar value of any good
merely reflects the relative ranking of that good in the value hierarchies
of consumers; the market value, or price, is some fraction of that value
resulting from price competition among suppliers.
> Different sections/areas of land would be "valuable" even if I was the
> only human being on the planet. The land is _VALUED_ in the labor and
> discomfort I can forgo by inhabiting and _USING_ one section of land
> as opposed to _USING_ another or in the exhilaration I will feel in
> one place as opposed to another. Exhilaration is the opposite of
> discomfort here. Exhilaration cannot be effectively "valued" without a
> market. But rest assured that "LABOR UNITS" are the most stable
> metrics with which to measure such relative value.
Now you are pulling a "Tim." I.e., trying to shoehorn all the various
benefits or satisfactions one might derive from a good into the concept of
"labor." Exhilaration can certainly be one of those; aesthetic preference
might be another. Trying to style labor as a proxy for all those affective
responses to things in the world is contrived and pointless. Any arbitrary
unit, e.g., dollars, serves the purpose without surrepititously promoting
an archaic economic theory.
BTW, your essay adopts another of those archaic notions, i.e., "the natural
world is the wellspring of all economic good." The quantity or market value
of their natural components has about as much to do with the market value
of most goods as the quantity of labor in them. Last figure I saw
attributes <5%% of GDP in advanced countries to natural resources. Advanced
economies are becoming increasingly "weightless."
