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Economy in a general way studies the behavior of what we can call value. We can quantize this value as some form of currency and start talking about it in terms of exchange, social services, whatever... then we would be talking about economy.


But I was thinking about what this value is ? This is a philosophical question not something that is answered by economy.


Value can be extended to more things than just economy, those things involve ecology, sociology, spirituality and ethics.


It is obvious the way value gets in those areas, like in ecology it is associated to the presence of food, good regions to live, and survivability. These rules of ecology dicate the behavior of a system, and this behavior depends on value. I put sociology in, because sociology is some kind of human ecology. In ethics and spirituality it is obvious the association.


The question is... Is that "value" used in all those places the one and the same, or they are different ? In which sense they are different if you think they are ?


I started to think about this because there was a lot of free time to do it... and because I saw somewhere an analogy between the spiritual energy called chi or prana and money. So I thought we could relate then using the concept of value. Do you think this relation can be made ?

Originally posted by Atlantis001
Economy in a general way studies the behavior of what we can call value. We can quantize this value as some form of currency and start talking about it in terms of exchange, social services, whatever... then we would be talking about economy.


But I was thinking about what this value is ? This is a philosophical question not something that is answered by economy.


Value can be extended to more things than just economy, those things involve ecology, sociology, spirituality and ethics.


It is obvious the way value gets in those areas, like in ecology it is associated to the presence of food, good regions to live, and survivability. These rules of ecology dicate the behavior of a system, and this behavior depends on value. I put sociology in, because sociology is some kind of human ecology. In ethics and spirituality it is obvious the association.


The question is... Is that "value" used in all those places the one and the same, or they are different ? In which sense they are different if you think they are ?


I started to think about this because there was a lot of free time to do it... and because I saw somewhere an analogy between the spiritual energy called chi or prana and money. So I thought we could relate then using the concept of value. Do you think this relation can be made ? Do you have a grasp of conditioned reinforcers and unconditional reinforcers?

Perhaps a study of the matching law combined with its derivative, progeny would help clarify value for you. At least from a more objective position.

Here is the most simple form of the matching law I can think of:

B1/B2 = R1/R2

Simply stated, the probability of a behavior will eventually match the probability of reinforcement, given the probability of reinforcement for all possible behaviors.

Value is the result of probability of reinforcer combined with the perceived quality of said reinforcer. Or in economics terms, the interaction between supply and demand.

"Value" by it's nature is a subjective term, that deals with the percieved level of importance of any given stimuli at a given time.

From this I would certainly say that "value" has many unrelated meanings. For instance, personal value is going to be based on experience and context whereas economic value is defined in supply/demand terms.

Value MAY be indicitive of some "cost/benefit analysis" but I would imagine that "economic value" and "cognitive value" would be compleatly differant things. For instance, can you think of something that is sold for more than you are willing to pay for it?

Originally posted by Regret
Perhaps a study of the matching law combined with its derivative, progeny would help clarify value for you. At least from a more objective position.

I think the matching law is also something where value can fit in. So we could talk about tendencies for given types of behavior as if its determining(or being determined) by the value related to then.


Originally posted by inamilist
Value MAY be indicitive of some "cost/benefit analysis" but I would imagine that "economic value" and "cognitive value" would be compleatly differant things. For instance, can you think of something that is sold for more than you are willing to pay for it?

I think a correlation between cognitive and economic value can be seen when we remember that economic value is determined by the worthness that humans give to then and something is not sold for more than what you are willing to pay for it.

Originally posted by Atlantis001

I think a correlation between cognitive and economic value can be seen when we remember that economic value is determined by the worthness that humans give to then and something is not sold for more than what you are willing to pay for it.

Many things are sold for more than I am willing to pay for them. CDs are probably the best example off the top of my head.

Sure, if all we want to define value as is "the attribution of worth to X" then fine, economic value is the same as emotional value, since it involves some entity making a cost/benefit analysis of some other thing.

I'd say there are 2 really important differences between emotive and economic value, the first being that economic value is based of projections of the future whereas emotive is based on past experience. The second is that emotive values are expressive and held specifically by one person whereas economic value is a generalization of patterns of consumption by many.

A really neat way to mince the words on this one could be:

the price of an item is based on what emotive value people have for it. Their emotive value is based on previous experiences with the item and its cost. The previous cost of the item was based on the value projected onto it by the predictions of supply and demand in the economy at the time. Supply and demand value at any time is determined by the collective individual value people put on items based on their previous experience with those items. And on at infinitum. You have found an excellent chicken vs egg conundrum, though I might be more inclined to say that market value drives emotive value more than the other way around (though, even as I write this a flood of instances where personal value has determined market performance come to mind).

This is the general problem with words. The more specific you get, the less able they are to convey any message. Any real truth can only be expressed as a mathematical ratio, and even then it is only based on what we know. Thusly, you can probably get "value" to have any semantic meaning you want it to, depending on how you pose the question.

I understand, there are more factors that determine the market price of an item than what we are calling "emotive factors" like the supply and demand value, or any thing that can be understood as an emotive factor.

What we can do, is generalize the concept of value to include other economic factors not yet reduced to a emotive or cognitive, or whatever language. The problem naturally is that we have to be sure about the meaning and the definition we are giving to value and in what sense exactly we are using the word, because without a precise definiton we would be just be playing with words.

I think we can develop such generalization without losing objectivity, but for now I am only discussing the possibility of doing that generalization.