The article in the url below is a radio interview, held a decade after the 2008 Financial Crisis, with the author of a book that had just been released, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (2018). The author's goal in writing the book, and why I found it interesting, was to redefine (or perhaps 'recapture' is more accurate) what we understand to constitute value.
To summarize: In calling for a broader theory of value in a wide ranging discussion (in the interview), the author draws a distinction between value determining price (previously) and price determining value (today) – a change she argues has occurred over the last couple of hundred years. In other words, previously, the more we valued the way something was produced, the more we would be willing to pay for it (emphasizing trades people and artisanal skills). This compares to today, where the author argues we now have it backwards because we interpret the price itself as determining how much we should value the product or service – in other words, things that are expensive are, by definition, more valuable to us than things that are cheaper. This same logic can be extended to resources such as labor, which is today valued by wage levels (generally determined at the intersection of demand and supply), rather than necessarily the nature of the work that is performed. In other words, we reward rarity, simply for the sake of being rare, rather than rewarding the work that delivers the most happiness or social value, or some other metric, which we used to do and the author thinks is a more commonsensical understanding of what we should value.
Take care
David
David Chandler
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A New Way to Calculate Economic Value
The Brian Lehrer Show
September 10, 2018
WYNC
