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I don't know. I do think that without virtue there can be no value, if these are properly defined. (Virtue corresponding to filling human needs, value being

I don't know. I do think that without virtue there can be no value, if these are properly defined. (Virtue corresponding to filling human needs, value being economic value.) Is entertaining people virtuous at least potentially? if so, then there is nothing wrong with selling video games, movies, music, or whatever. If not, however then you have a problem because while the world make seem nice on paper (no money to Hollywood since that would take away from cancer research), it isn't a world any of us would like to live in. The problem is from where I sit that the expected value (what investors will put in things) is wildly out of proportion to the actual delivered value to customers. I think this is even true of giants like Facebook, so what we get are speculative bubbles because investors are assuming there is more value than there is.

jacques_chester 13y ago
> I do think that without virtue there can be no value, if these are properly defined. This is an unproductive line of argument because either of us can just keep moving the goalposts until we're exhausted. Economic value clearly doesn't follow any "gut" virtue. Here's how an early moral theorist put it in a notoriously influential book: I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Generally speaking, attempts to create ranking functions for virtue lead to mismatches with the observed state of the world. You line up the list of virtuous things (curing AIDS, feeding poor people) and the list of valuable things (Ruby on Rails programmers, inanimate chunks of metal) and discover that they just don't line up. At all. But if you try to impose a virtuous order, it all goes kerflooie. Because the whole system of production and allocation relies entirely on value. When you take value you away, it stops working. Partial enforcement leads to partial derangement and in general, creates new evils, requiring still further ranking functions ... it spirals out of control thereafter. We read this: Dear friend, it is not possible for man to avert that which God has decreed shall happen. No one believes warnings, however true. Many of us Persians know our danger, but we are constrained by necessity to do as our leader bids us. Verily 'tis the sorest of all human ills, to abound in knowledge and yet have no power over action. And imagine ourselves to be men and women both of knowledge and power. But it was always an illusion. I'm doing a pretty poor job of explaining all this. Hayek's Social or 'Distributive' Justice does a much more convincing, thorough and erudite job. It was published in the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty, also in The Essence of Hayek. edit: by the way, your blog about LedgerSMB and PostgreSQL is bloody marvellous.
- Retric 13y ago
  You say this because we practically live in a post scarcity society. 500+ years ago people valued hard labor that brought food because food prevented starvation a vary real and horrible thing. Now, food is an evil that brings heart disease and obesity. Our desires for food and our well being are out of alignment. Value is now a function of are desires with little connection to our needs. Stealing from people was never thought of as a productive economic activity, but legally things like patent trolls that act like stealing are legal. So, I suspect you could creat a society where virtue and value are at least aligned and historically they may have been closer. However, we don't live in such a place.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    In post scarcity society things would be completely different, as the market value pretty much loses its meaning when everything you want to buy is free.
  - inthewind 13y ago
    I follow the thrust of what you say, and it's nice to hear that the OP is doing so well. Some of us though are still living hand to mouth.
  - pjungwir 13y ago
    I think the evidence is that value and virtue have never correlated very well, scarcity or not. Hence quotations from two of the oldest books on the planet. Value and virtue are not orthogonal either, but it's messy.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  Hmmm this is a very difficult topic to really do justice to. I don't think that Hayek is necessarily contrary to anything I am saying. The problem though is a definition of virtue. > You line up the list of virtuous things (curing AIDS, feeding poor people) and the list of valuable things (Ruby on Rails programmers, inanimate chunks of metal) and discover that they just don't line up. At all. But the problem here is that without a framework for deciding what is virtuous, all you are doing is assigning your own measure of value. In that regard your argument boils down to "what you think is valuable is not necessarily a solution that lots of people will pay money for." But I do think that virtuous solutions are valuable to the extent they are virtuous. A cure for cancer would be worth, I would expect, thousands or millions of times what a hollywood blockbuster would be. However there are limits to this analysis. While I think valuable = virtuous with regard to solutions it doesn't necessarily follow that the coal miner is less virtuous than the Ruby programmer. Wages are determined in ways that both do and don't resemble market economics as even Adam Smith noted (he saw wage levels as being indicative of negotiating power differences between various professions). So my caution is to avoid looking at wages (ruby programmers vs coal miners) in the same way you look at solutions (cure for cancer vs the next big MTV hit).

jacques_chester 13y ago

> I do think that without virtue there can be no value, if these are properly defined. This is an unproductive line of argument because either of us can just keep moving the goalposts until we're exhausted. Economic value clearly doesn't follow any "gut" virtue. Here's how an early moral theorist put it in a notoriously influential book: I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Generally speaking, attempts to create ranking functions for virtue lead to mismatches with the observed state of the world. You line up the list of virtuous things (curing AIDS, feeding poor people) and the list of valuable things (Ruby on Rails programmers, inanimate chunks of metal) and discover that they just don't line up. At all. But if you try to impose a virtuous order, it all goes kerflooie. Because the whole system of production and allocation relies entirely on value. When you take value you away, it stops working. Partial enforcement leads to partial derangement and in general, creates new evils, requiring still further ranking functions ... it spirals out of control thereafter. We read this: Dear friend, it is not possible for man to avert that which God has decreed shall happen. No one believes warnings, however true. Many of us Persians know our danger, but we are constrained by necessity to do as our leader bids us. Verily 'tis the sorest of all human ills, to abound in knowledge and yet have no power over action. And imagine ourselves to be men and women both of knowledge and power. But it was always an illusion. I'm doing a pretty poor job of explaining all this. Hayek's Social or 'Distributive' Justice does a much more convincing, thorough and erudite job. It was published in the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty, also in The Essence of Hayek. edit: by the way, your blog about LedgerSMB and PostgreSQL is bloody marvellous.

Retric 13y ago
You say this because we practically live in a post scarcity society. 500+ years ago people valued hard labor that brought food because food prevented starvation a vary real and horrible thing. Now, food is an evil that brings heart disease and obesity. Our desires for food and our well being are out of alignment. Value is now a function of are desires with little connection to our needs. Stealing from people was never thought of as a productive economic activity, but legally things like patent trolls that act like stealing are legal. So, I suspect you could creat a society where virtue and value are at least aligned and historically they may have been closer. However, we don't live in such a place.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  In post scarcity society things would be completely different, as the market value pretty much loses its meaning when everything you want to buy is free.
- inthewind 13y ago
  I follow the thrust of what you say, and it's nice to hear that the OP is doing so well. Some of us though are still living hand to mouth.
- pjungwir 13y ago
  I think the evidence is that value and virtue have never correlated very well, scarcity or not. Hence quotations from two of the oldest books on the planet. Value and virtue are not orthogonal either, but it's messy.
einhverfr 13y ago
Hmmm this is a very difficult topic to really do justice to. I don't think that Hayek is necessarily contrary to anything I am saying. The problem though is a definition of virtue. > You line up the list of virtuous things (curing AIDS, feeding poor people) and the list of valuable things (Ruby on Rails programmers, inanimate chunks of metal) and discover that they just don't line up. At all. But the problem here is that without a framework for deciding what is virtuous, all you are doing is assigning your own measure of value. In that regard your argument boils down to "what you think is valuable is not necessarily a solution that lots of people will pay money for." But I do think that virtuous solutions are valuable to the extent they are virtuous. A cure for cancer would be worth, I would expect, thousands or millions of times what a hollywood blockbuster would be. However there are limits to this analysis. While I think valuable = virtuous with regard to solutions it doesn't necessarily follow that the coal miner is less virtuous than the Ruby programmer. Wages are determined in ways that both do and don't resemble market economics as even Adam Smith noted (he saw wage levels as being indicative of negotiating power differences between various professions). So my caution is to avoid looking at wages (ruby programmers vs coal miners) in the same way you look at solutions (cure for cancer vs the next big MTV hit).