If we accept Cowen's premise regarding what constitutes value, Kant and Hegel were crappy authors because they had a small number of pageviews. We probably shou

If we accept Cowen's premise regarding what constitutes value, Kant and Hegel were crappy authors because they had a small number of pageviews. We probably should have valued their contributions less; it's great we have such objective measures now, and we probably won't make that mistake again. From the article: Today a digital media company knows exactly how many people are reading which articles for how long, and also whether they click through to other links. The exactness and the transparency offered by information technology allow us to measure value fairly precisely. There are two different logics at play here, with incommensurate notions of value. The firm's primary goal is to make money; as such a story's value is largely a function of page views (or click-through on ads, etc.) However, we can also assess the value of some produce (article, etc.) at a longer-term societal level. In this case a good story is one that helps policymakers reconceptualize an issue or foment some sort of social change (e.g. a New Yorker article like this one [1]). Within the language of free-market economics these longer-term positive effects might be called "externalities" or "intangibles"; intuitively they are much harder to measure, especially with capital flows. But think about it— do we really want to incentivize firms, and by proxy employees, to maximize value as measured by immediate capital flows? More generally, there isn't a natural law that says that compensation should be proportional to output—quality of life may well be better even at the top if this relationship is somewhat dampened. The cognitive cost may be lower, for example, of not continually switching jobs based on market conditions (this is certainly true in the limit) or of reducing anxiety about losing the ability to produce (e.g. health and psychological wellbeing). These are issues we need to think about and discuss at length, not take as premises. [1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/06/revenge-killing http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/06/revenge-killing Edited to fix italics and to correct the spelling of Cowen's name.