Summations Only

Well clearly value and worth are equivalent to money on an accounting ledger containing only values and worths as translated into dollars and cents.But if all you wanted to talk about was accounting with little concern as to how applicable accounting principles are to economics, then saying so from the start would have been helpful.

And how do those come about?

Your definition of 'productivity' is useless.Once again you've equated another word that is unrelated to money with money. First value = price. Now productivity = profit.What's next? Eating = income?Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

So?

And what determines whether the company does well or poorly?

I notice you're doing a good job of acknowledging my questions, but not a very good job answering them.

But why the company does well or poorly is directly related to the topic and your apparent blindness to the fact that it is average people working and not rich people passing money back and forth that is at the heart of wealth creation.All the wealthy class does is hold hostage the resources used by the working classes to produce goods and servicesto generate wealth. And then they act as though the occasional release of a hostage is deserving sainthood.Well pucky to that!Big pucky.Jon

No; its scarcity would increase, and this would cause the price to go up. The way to make the value of something increase is to make it able of providing greater percieved benefit to the consumers.A scientific discovery showing that vitamin C has health benefits no one ever knew of before would increase its value to consumers. Falling back on the claim that oxygen has a value of $0 should be a clear sign that your position is in serious trouble.Jon

And you also said it would cause a value increase.

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Percy in Message 201:

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If for some reason the supply of vitamin C became limited in a region of the world (including in available food) then its perceived value would increase and the price would rise.

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And that's false. But aside from yourself, can you find anyone else who will say it has no value? No. They'll always have very, very low price. Which is different than value. And in fact it would be a bargain. But the free air everywhere else is an even bigger bargain. And that is why no one will pay you $10k for your year's supply of aironly insane people pay for something that is readily available everywhere else for free. No. That's how to get people to pay a higher price for air; but it doesn't increase its value. And yet infinitely valuable.Go figure!Jon

What is this special definition? Where have you laid it out? And that's not a reply at all to what I said. So aside from yourself, can you find anyone else who will say air has no value? And a dozen times differently at that. And that's also bullshit. I'm sure those people working at the coal-fired power plants can tell you how equally profitable it would be for their business if they didn't have air into which they could dump their toxic waste but instead had to bottle it all up and store it in tanks. Or those ranchers whose business would be just as profitable if they had to fit all of their cattle with oxygen tanks. Air isn't an economic commodity? Are you sure? Air doesn't play any role in any economic production at all? It's just worthless? Get rid of it and we might all die, but business will go on as usual?Puh-lease! Give me a break sir. There's plenty of value in that air.Oh but wait... it doesn't appear on a random list of costs and profits, so it therefore doesn't count.Go figure!Jon

That tells me nothing. I could replace the word 'value' in your explanation with a dozen other words and still end up with a coherent and true sentence and yet walk away from reading it none the wiser as to what the hell those words mean. This definition of 'value' is too vague and unspecific. Okay. Well and good, but the question was: "So aside from yourself, can you find anyone else who will say air has no value?" Please, if you can, address that question, and not the several other invented questions you've so far been responding to. Who cares? It still has value.Jon

What's the point of having a separate term'value in trade'if you're just going to equate it with a term that already exists'price'?Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

But this example only looks cool because you've got three different places selling the same item at different prices. When you actually try applying the concept, though, it just results in stupid.Imagine a small town of 400 people. There's only one grocery store in town. Good? They sell a bag of peas for $1.50 (small-town markup). Everyone who pays $1.50 for the bag of peas gets $1.50 worth of peas, so there is a price/value ratio of 1. On Tuesday the grocer sells ten bags of peas for $1.50/bag. Feeling greedy, he raises his price for Wednesday, and successfully sells ten more bags at $3.00/bag. Wondering just how high he can push it, he raises his price one more time for Thursday, on which day he sells ten bags of peas at $4.50/bag (3 the price they went for on Tuesday).Using your formula, we calculate the value of a bag of peas as $3.00 (total price paid over three days/# bags sold = $90/30 = $3.00). So the people who bought peas on Tuesday got a great deal, a price/value ratio of 0.5. The people who bought peas on Thursday got a pretty foul deal with a price/value ratio of 3. While the people who bought peas on Wednesday got a fair deal with a price/value ratio of 1even though when they bought the peas on Wednesday they were getting ripped off because the price/value ratio on that day would have been 2.25 (after the sale of the tenth bag).So our grocer has a pretty nice trick running for himself here. Whenever any of his customers come to his store and complain about getting ripped off, he merely has to raise his prices, sell a few more units, and show them that their price/value ratio is actually lower than they thought. Right?Of course not! Because real people in the real world don't fall for such malarkey. Real people in the real world who talk about 'value' don't care about 'value in trade'which they call 'price'but just 'value in use'which they just call 'value'. And that is the value that determines how much they are willing to pay for something, which means that is the value that sellers care about when trying to set their prices.The pricing clerk at the grocery store doesn't determine the value of a bag of peas by putting up a sign. The consumer determines the value of a bag of peas and that's how the pricing clerk decides what number to put on that sign. That's how the real world works, and if whatever model of economics you are using cannot describe things in this way, then that model is useless.Jon

You mean... even though the restaurant kept all of its prices the same?Shocker that is!

But if the inputs were simply freely available for all to take, then no loan would be necessary.So what value does ownership actually add to a resource? To a finished product?Two farmers. One has to buy a plot of landsay 50 acresfrom a wealthy real-estate mogul at $5,000/acre, for which he takes out a loan. The other finds a 50-acre piece of land with a big sign on it that says 'Unowned. Finders Keepers'. The plots of land are the same in terms of their quality for use as farmland. Both farmers produce equal yields (because they are hard workers and have identically-yielding land) and sell for an equal price (which will be national market pricethe highest price either can get). Thus, every year, they generate identical incomes.Which scenario involves the creation of more wealth? And who, in each instance, is actually creating that wealth? And it can't. Unless you redefine 'capital' in the broadest of ways to include almost anything and everything/one involved in the production process of goods and services. A product of the current capitalist system you so greatly revere. Of course we can measure it. We can look at productivity before the circuit and after; or we can compare economies that make use of such technology to economies that don't. We can even look at individual businesses where one firm employs a technology while another does not. That many if not all companies fail to measure the impact of the integrated circuit on their business doesn't mean it is unmeasurable.