On Value
Post #1505 ☙ January 27, 2012, 10:39 AM ☙ 8 Comments
David Thompson links this morning to Samizdata, which features a video that made me wonder if I had gotten something wrong in my essay High and Low: What is Excellence in the Arts?.
Dr. Madsen Pirie, president of the Adam Smith Institute, is saying that value is in the mind that thinks about the object, not the object itself. Does this contradict what I said about artistic excellence, that it's a dynamic between perceiver and perceived?
I agree with Dr. Pirie that if I have no desire for something it has no value to me. And yet if someone crafts an object with the intention of making something that has value for him, there's an extant chance that I, as a fellow human, will find something of value in it as well. In terms I used in my essay, he has put qualities into the object that are designed to trigger my experience of value. Whether those triggers have any affect depends on my state of mind.
So I say there's no contradiction at the point that this becomes an economic discussion, but before that, at an aesthetic level, there may be.
Marx, in any case, is still wrong.
2.
January 27, 2012, 11:21 AM
And sure enough, even a quick skim of the Wikipedia page on the Labor Theory of Value shows that Marx's thinking was significantly more subtle than your sketch of it.
In fact it's clear even from the brief precis at Wikipedia that Marx wasn't discussing labor and value at the level of an individual—"I have worked very hard on this ugly little vase and therefore it's worth more"—but at the level of society, an aggregate of individuals—"the value of a product is determined more by societal standards than by individual conditions."
Even considering this very shallowly this makes some sense of the pricing of the works of Damien Hirst, just to name one example. There's a case where societal standards have set the value of the works far more than labor input or individual assessments of worth.
Even at the level Dr. Pirie is discussing it's evident, if you think for a moment, that he's greatly simplifying things. When a caveman trades his bone hook for a skin, there's certainly going to be some consideration for how hard he worked to make his bone hook, and how hard he'd have to work to get his own skin, or how hard he perceives skin acquisition to be. The value may be in the caveman's head—by the way, is there some requirement that economics professors pretend ignorance of anthropology?—but the caveman's calculations of value certainly take into account, to some degree, the labor involved.
3.
January 27, 2012, 11:29 AM
Let's say I don't fish, though—in keeping with total ignorance of anthropology, and paleobiology to boot, I'm a triceratops hunter. On an aesthetic level I could admire the labor that went into that bone hook, assuming fine, canny labor. But if it's worth less to me than anything I have, I'm not going to trade for it. Sure, it's a simplification. This is "Economics is Fun," after all. But what Pirie is saying about demand still holds. "That's great, Ug, but what I really need is a bone letter opener. And I'll give you three skins for it if you carve in a picture of a triceratops."
I don't buy the aggregate argument. My wanting to appear a certain way to my society is just another individual demand. If you look around the sentence of Marx you quoted, you have this before it:
"Socially necessary" labor refers to the quantity required to produce a commodity "in a given state of society, under certain social average conditions or production, with a given social average intensity, and average skill of the labour employed."
And this after it:
This explains why technological breakthroughs lower the price of commodities and put less advanced producers out of business. Finally, it is not labor per se, which creates value, but labor power sold by free wage workers to capitalists.
I was thinking basically the same thing as you at first—that labor was all but guaranteed to add value, to the extent that one man's effort to create value for himself was likely to have universal value on some level even if not all individuals were destined to find it. But Marx contradicts this, wrongly, in my opinion. He's after something else: a "natural price" for commodities. It doesn't exist. To get there he's trying to average the unaverageable.
4.
January 27, 2012, 12:13 PM
“Regardless of what lies behind our instincts for art, those instincts bestow it with a transcendence of time, place, and culture. Hume noted that 'the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature… the same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and London.' Though people can argue about whether the glass is half full or half empty, a universal human aesthetic can be discerned beneath the variation across cultures.” - Steven Pinker
"We have differences but we're not made different. If you don't agree with me, you're wrong." - Clement Greenberg
5.
January 27, 2012, 3:51 PM
This guy is making a kind of marginal utility argument, which has replaced the labor theory of value (a theory held to be true by none other than Adam Smith) in intellectual circles that are desperate to justify trade as being, in his words, "win-win." Plus, Dr. Pirie reveals his basic ignorance in the first few seconds. Unless you and I and the rest of the living creatures on earth can live on imaginary food, water, and air, natural resources have intrinsic value. That's why even non-human species compete for access to them.
Chris is right, Marx's penetration into the natural laws of capitalism are profound and very subtle. They are also simplified, maligned, and misrepresented on a regular basis by those who stand to befit from current economic conditions, like the guy in the video. Marx recognizes value as being a social relationship, not an objective quality inherent in objects conferred by concrete labor. But you would have to get past the first three chapters of Capital to make that discovery, which most neoliberal economists are incapable of doing.
Simplifying economics is a bit like simplifying Shakespeare, but with dire consequences.
6.
January 27, 2012, 6:17 PM
Alan, you're contradicting yourself, or Marx is contradicting you, when you say at first that natural resources have intrinsic value, and then that value is a social relationship. I don't know if Dr. Pirie would agree with me, but I think that when it comes to natural resources, the body is not separate from the mind. Lack of water in the body manifests as the experience of thirst, which alerts the mind to obtain water. If I understand rightly, Smith's conception of the labor theory of value doesn't contradict neoliberal value theory. Marx's does.
I'm a neoliberal myself, by way of deontological (though not opposed to consequentialist) libertarianism. The subtlety of Marx's thinking is irrelevant if it's wrong, and this is what I keep seeing borne out as I look at how Marxism has been applied. Marxist aesthetics are a disaster on all counts, which I regard as a bad sign (and one that I hold against Ayn Rand as well). If there's an argument in Capital that contradicts what Pirie is saying in the context of voluntary exchanges, I'm interested in hearing it—I have a lot of reading about free-market economics to catch up on before I get around to Capital.
7.
January 27, 2012, 9:16 PM
Value is not an inherent property. It is a judgment we make about a thing according to how its properties accommodate a particular use.
8.
January 27, 2012, 10:39 PM
That's fine until we consider something that we value but have no use for, such as art, arguably, or a sunset.
1.
Chris Rywalt
January 27, 2012, 10:51 AM
I've never read Karl Marx myself, so I can't say for sure what he said or didn't say about anything. But I know that Marx was a very smart guy, and Adam Smith had written what he'd written quite a bit before Marx was working, so I can't believe that Marx made such a basic error. I'm going to therefore conclude—tentatively—that Dr. Pirie—and you, Franklin, and potentially other people as well—have misread Marx.
Off to do some reading of my own on the subject.