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A future, or an insurance, are typically commodities with great exchange values and low (or rather, unknown) use value. The opposite of the food the farmer sell
by orwin 3y ago
A future, or an insurance, are typically commodities with great exchange values and low (or rather, unknown) use value. The opposite of the food the farmer sells.
[edit] > those categories I think are either too imprecise to describe reality[...]
I agree signal/sign value and exchange value are imprecise and would benefit being more divided (I really like the notion of sign value as I think it is useful to explain 90% of modern western society). I disagree on their uselessness. Value can mean a lot of things and having more words to describe those things is always useful. A reverse 1984 if you will.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI agree that value can be used for a lot of things; I disagree that those particular 4 things are the right subcategories, or even that they all represent useful categories for economic value at all. Judging economic value by sale price alone makes a huge amount of sense, and seems to subsume all of those subcategories (well - it is one of the subcategories. But the other three, at least.) And it also includes pricing for services that reduce risk, such as energy reselling, car insurance, or futures trading.
- jampekka 3y agoSo murder for hire produces value?
- robertlagrant 3y agoSorry - I'm not following. Are you trying to say that my conception of economic value would say that, but Marx's wouldn't?
- orwin 3y agoI disagree. Use value is useful. Consider that in modern countries, energy is less than 5% of GDP, as is agriculture, and domestic water less than 1%. If you only take into account exchange value, you're missing that information. Production value is useful too. It explain the production cost. Crude oil production value is very low, but it's exchange value is high. I will say that sign value is sometimes declined from exchange or production value (it's pricy/handmade, hence a good status symbol), but I like to use it because I find it useful to understand the price of representation (and it triggers some Marxists)
- robertlagrant 3y agoI'm not saying "use value" isn't useful; I'm saying it's proxied by price. > Production value is useful too. It explain the production cost. Can you give an example?
- orwin 3y ago> I'm not saying "use value" isn't useful; I'm saying it's proxied by price. Its not, not really. Water has the most use value of anything you can imagine, and is also one of the cheapest thing to buy. Production value is the effort, material and time spent. It is different from production cost, because production cost will say that a SE Asian time is worth way less than an US citizen time. But modulo material costs, items made in the US by US citizen have the same (production) value as the same item made in China. It will also have the exact same use value, the only difference will be its exchange value (items made in Asia are cheaper), and sign value, as you're more likely to say: 'hey, look, it's made locally' than 'hey, look, it's made in China' if you want to brag about your T-shirt.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Production value is the effort, material and time spent This is the sort of thing I mean - it seems an artificial distinction to make a political point. E.g. if I rent a warehouse use as a factory building, or buy a machine that can make so many thousand widgets, these don't seem to fall anywhere in the conception of what it takes to make something. And even if it does - so what? What is production value for?