Reinvigorating the most important battle in economics

Really valuation as a pursuit was abandoned for a damned good reason - it took a lot of time to get it through most of humanity's thick heads that value is circumstance based. Even something outragously useful like a fountain of youth would become relatively worthless if it was nearly ubiquitous like oxygen.

Likewise the public sector section is annoyingly simplistic in that it doesn't grasp the difference between neccessary and sufficent in creation. Research certainly does give major dividend when it is pulled off but it also requires utilization.

I am not sure if the actual book addresses it better but any refusal to acknowledge the complexity and tries for a simple one size fits all is frankly insane.

I would say the assumption of correctness is a "if you are so smart why aren't you rich" sort of heuristic.

Essentially if you knew that and that it was wrong then it would lead to massive arbitrage opportunities.

Personally I believe that treating value in terms of "should" is asking the wrong question. The actual questions are chains.

* What is the current production cost? Can we do better? * What does it cost to produce production if we can? How long does it take to get it producing? * Can anything substitute for it acceptably?

All theories of value integrate the idea of circumstance into their workings; Ricardo himself realized this. The spirit of the marginalist objection to an "objective" theory of value (I put objective in quotes because it's a mistake to view it as anything but as Marx put it a "phantom-like objectivity") was put by Whatley in 1832: "It is not that pearls fetch a high price because men have dived for them; but on the contrary, men dive for them because they fetch a high price" but as Cockshott and Cottrel put in Classical Econophysics, "if pearls washed up on the beach, they would not collect anything like their current price".

Ricardo's reply was that the precondition to a commodity having value is that it is firstly an object of demand. Smith's, Ricardo's and Marx's theories of value (the commonalities of which tend to be overstated, even by the likes of greats such as Samuelson) all describe the case in which if I decide to make a product and nobody (or not enough people) want it, this leads to my realization that what I've been doing is useless and subsequently moving my capital elsewhere.

I think Carchedi and Kliman defend Marx's version of the "labour theory of value" quite well, as do Shaikh and Tonak on empirical grounds, and from an opposing perspective Dumenil and Levy do as well. Others, such as Moseley and Patrick Murray, relax their conditions a litle and argue that it is a mistake to apply the theory to individual commodities, rather, it can only be applied to "aliquots representative of the lot".

I have a comment here with some (slightly outdated) information as to the status of the classical (mostly Ricardian and Marxian) theories of value among the people who still study it (usually heterodox economists): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18490388

I'm trying to understand this.

If I sell you something does that count as part of GDP? If I sell my labor to a company does my selling of it become part of the GDP? Then the company sells the product I produced for it, is that added to the GDP as well?

Or is it only when a company sells something that it is counted as part of the GDP?

>She seems to believe that the public sector can innovate...okay, where is the evidence of this?

Well, she wrote a whole book about it, she's not just asserting it. The public sector played a huge part in the genesis of the Internet for one thing.

>The examples of successful innovation are cases where private incentives have been merged with public funding. All very suspect.

But another pretty critical point of that book was that our public conversation is inhibited by the extremely limited vocabulary we use to describe it. Is a defence contractor really part of the "private sector"? Is a NASA engineering team part of the "public sector" the way an employee of a mail sorting centre is? What about an academic working for an old school monopolist like Bell? Ok, fine it was privately owned so if you want to use a crude and almost useless private/public sector split it is very easy to say "private" but it's not private sector in quite the same way as a local shop is, is it?