Summations Only

I find this flawed. And here is why:What a good or service is worth is a measure of the benefit that someone receives from consuming that good or service. For obvious reasons, this cannot be the same as what someone is willing to pay for that good or service since people will only exchange their ability to consume something else (which is all paying for something is) if the thing they are consuming is worth more to them than the other things they gave up consuming (that is the other things they could have bought with the money they paid, = the price of the good or service). If the purchased item does not provide a higher return (even if it is just perceived) than what it cost, it will not be purchased. People have to think the item on the shelf is worth more than the money in their pockets before they will exchange the latter for the former.Jon

And that is completely disconnected from the real-world value people place on things.S'pose that explains why it's so popular in pop-culture economics.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

This is understandable. Percy appears to have something of a faulty impression of what economics is, which he equates to bookkeeping (which it isn't, since we call that 'bookkeeping' not 'economics'). This is understandable, as I said, because that is how economics is so often portrayed in the capitalistic west: the 'science' of how rich people move money back and forth.But this misses the fact that economics is not a study of money changing hands but rather a study of human behavior (economics is a social science, after allfor what it's worth, bookkeeping is part of accounting, which is a business-related field). Broadly speaking, economics is simply a study of how people satisfy their wants and needs.That said, what you have noted is completely correct: Percy's understanding of 'worth' cannot be a valid economic concept because it is not universally applicable while worth itself does exist universally. We need a conception of 'worth' that isn't based on dollars and cents. We need a conception that can be applied as much to the billionaire in the office as to the subsistence farmer in the jungle. And a definition of 'worth' as 'willingness to pay' simply doesn't get us that.Jon

That's not true. That's just the pop-culture economics you're thinking of. The kind of stuff in the news all the time.Real economics is an honest and sincere study of human behavior.

'Fraid you're still not addressing the major objection I raised to your understanding of 'worth'.At the end of the day, we bought a loaf of bread for $1.50 because that bread was worth more to us than the money we paid for it.¹ This should be a clear sign for why we cannot use willingness to pay as a marker for worth: because the amount someone pays is always less than their perceived worth of the good or service they are purchasing; it has to be or else they won't buy it.How can we use one value as a marker for another when we know for a fact that they are never going to be the same?It simply doesn't work.Willingness to pay ≠ WorthJon
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¹ The mere fact that we can talk about the 'worth' of $1.50 should tell us that worth is something separate from money and payments. It has to be measured by something other than dollars and cents.

What other forms of value are there?

Intangible value? That's it? Economic value and intangible value?Can I ask why these two things aren't one?

Nothing. He is an owner of capital. Owners of capital contribute nothing to wealth creation because they are and can only be blockades to the free access to resources for the people who actually use those resources to produce goods and services.Private ownership is always an obstacle to public wealth creation. Always.JonEdited by Jon, : No reason given.

Is that reply at all relevant?

That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Many resources are freely accessible: oxygen, sunlight, friendship. Free access to water, an essential resource if you weren't aware, is considered by many to be a fundamental human right and there are many organizations the world over that help to ensure that everyone has such free access.Not every resource is owned and sold, ya know, nor should they be.Jon

Ownership contributes nothing to wealth creation. The fact that valuable resources are owned does not increase their value nor the value of the things manufactured from those resourcesit only increases their price to the consumer.Unless, of course, you live in a world where the value of something is equal to its price, where the same water you get from the tap can become more valuable when sold for $10/gal.But nobody lives in that world except you.Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

It has to do with your claim that I live in a fantasy world because I believe there are such things as freely accessible resources.The fact that freely accessible resources exist in this very worldthe one we all live indemonstrates quite clearly that your claim is nonsense and that my 'fantasy' is indeed quite real.You can pretend you never made that claim if you want, though... I'll forget it happened. Jon

Good ol' pop-culture economics again. Nonsensical accounting slogans with no actual relationship to the real world.

Of course I'm not claiming such a thing. How could you possibly get this from what I have said? Sunlight, oxygen, and friendship are examples of freely accessible resourcesthere are no blockades to them.But none of this addresses the fact that the man who loans the money contributes nothing whatsoever to wealth creation. If the resource that are owned by the people you are trying to buy them from (that's why you need a loan, right?) were freely accessible, you wouldn't need to pay those people for them and you wouldn't need a loan so you wouldn't need to pay the interest on that loan either.The fact that you have to jump through all these price hoops to realize your great idea shows that capital ownership is a hindrance to wealth creation; owners of capital do not help motivate wealth creation, they stall it at every stage by constantly extorting money out of the people aactually responsible for the wealth ceration.

This is just the western world economics-as-accounting version of how things go.Do you think the economies in the jungles of South America operate with interest, shares, and venture capital?Basic economic principles like worth and value should be far more universal than this. As I pointed out to CS, there are plenty of very valuable resources that are 100% freely available. And the way to make them freely available is to simply not have anyone own them.