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There's a really interesting topic in sociology called "commensuration": in short, the ability and willingness to view one thing as commensurate or equal in val

There's a really interesting topic in sociology called "commensuration": in short, the ability and willingness to view one thing as commensurate or equal in value to another. Sometimes we want to compare complicated but very different things, so we are motivated by need (e.g. politics) to collapse a thing with multi-dimensional values into a thing with a single-dimensional value, so it can be compared with another thing (e.g. via price). We are willing to engage in commensuration in some areas of life (e.g. this mountain forest is worth $1.2B) but not others (my child is worth $X). What's interesting to me is the space that is incommensurable--the values in life that we deem so important and so sacred that we are unwilling to bend or collapse the multi-dimensional value of a thing into a simplified "price". This is where economics fails to model life and value properly.

breatheoften 8y ago
Commensuration seems like a very interesting concept. I would wager that sociologists could actually observe different sets of commensurate things by asking questions with respect to different units of value. E.G. -- asking participants if they are willing to trade a thing for dollars vs asking them if they are willing to trade a thing for, say, trips to europe. The units don't fundamentally change the relationship between the concepts but I would guess have a good chance of altering the way people respond to surveys. This non-associativity of commensuration seems like an example of a kind of valuation phenomenon that perhaps a two-dimensional pricing system could better approximate -- even in the presence of actuarial optimization ...