From: Andrew Clough (aclough@mit.edu)
Date: Sun Jun 16 2002 - 10:32:58 MDT
At 07:13 PM 6/14/2002 -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > (Lorrey)
>
> > Not quite. I cut and chop ten cord of firewood. Nobody asked me to, but
> > there is a current market demand of $150 a cord for cut and chopped
> > firewood. I offer my firewood for sale, on speculation, and sell for an
> > average of $160 a cord because I'm so good at my work. My labor
> > therefore has a value.
>
>Only if someone actually will pay it; if there doesn't happen to be
>anyone who wants to pay for your firewood, then all your work was wasted
>effort. The "value" of chopped firewood is created by the desire of the
>consumer, and didn't exist until the moment of his desire. Once that
>value exists, you can then choose to exercise your labor in manufacturing
>this valuable item to make a proift. But it didn't /become/ valuable
>because you worked on it--it became valuable because someone wanted it,
>and you chose to take advantage of that fact with your labor. What would
>happen if a few hours after you finished chopping, while you were resting
>on your $160 cord which you created from $40 worth of unchopped wood,
>someone announces the invention of a new woodchopper that causes the market
>value of chopped wood to plummet to $50? The amount of labor you
>expended didn't change--it's just worth a lot less because its value to
>consumers changed. Value is created by demand, not supply.
I think the answer to the "Value: supply or demand?" controversy is the
same as the answer to so many other dualities throughout history, like the
wave/particle duality of light, the answer being "yes, both." Of course
there wouldn't be any valuable wood if there wasn't any wood, and of course
there wouldn't be any valuable cut would if nobody valued it at all.
Personally, I'm sure that I don't know whether we should enforce
intellectual property (though I do have some ill informed opinions on that
^_^ ) but there is no reason to waste time arguing on an issue that can't
be resolved in only one way. It may be that the value function is more
complicated than
(work * desire) but I think its been amply demonstrated that if either is
0, the function is 0; so, without further ado, and how's that for a
complicated sentence, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
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