Summations Only

So I should hope. It is quite impressive, isn't it? I am, so far as I know, the only person in the world who can misrepresent someone by repeated in-context word-for-word quotation of what he said. No-one else can do this. I'm awesome. Did you miss post #194? It is perfectly "mainstream" to associate value with utility rather than price. Also, it's non-stupid. Would you like to ask some real people if oxygen has no value to them? Or if free software has no economic value?You're pretty much surrounded by perfectly real people who are telling you that value and price are two different things. You are also told this by those "mainstream economists" who aren't an anonymous person of unknown qualifications editing Wikipedia.

Or, alternatively, it seems like I have studied economics and you haven't. That would also explain why the two of us are in disagreement given the fact that I have actually studied economic textbooks and you are disagreeing with me based on your understanding of something that some anonymous person posted on Wikipedia. Mmm ... that analogy would be better if we were talking about something that you'd studied and I hadn't, rather than the other way round. Meaning that the price they paid for it was $0.Now, what is the contribution to the company's revenue? I would enter the price as $0 and the return on investment as whatever it actually was. This is how companies do business. Well, the ones that don't go bankrupt.Do you really think that companies calculate the value of a transaction to them as the price they pay for it? They don't. Otherwise they'd calculate their profits as having negative value, since when they make money people are paying them.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Ah, the strawman. I never said that they could never be the same. I have also never said that someone's height in centimeters and his IQ could never be the same. I would however say that you should not conflate the two. And yet you do not think that your oxygen supply is without value to you, except when you wish to talk nonsense. Ah, personal abuse. The finest kind of argument if you don't have an actual argument.OK, let's try this. Without looking it up, tell me what contribution Walras made to neoclassical economics. This is a man who in his field has been compared to Isaac Newton. Without looking it up, what did he do?No?OK, one of us has studied neoclassical economics and the other hasn't. That would be me and you, respectively. As indeed they do. The same logic does lead me to that conclusion. That's the great thing about employing logic and being right. You talk as though you've led me into a reductio ad absurdum. No, you've lead me into a reductio ad being right. No, they have finite prices less than infinity. Like oxygen. And creation science is science, right? It's all in the name.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

If all you have are ill-chosen insults, then there is indeed little point in the dialog.You keep quoting WP saying that in mainstream economics price is the same as value, and even when you try to nuance that statement you say yourself that the difference between economists who say that it is and economists who say that it isn't is as trivial as the distinction between people who say that the earth is spherical and the people who are slightly more precise in their statements. As I have often remarked to creationists, I understand what you're trying to say perfectly well. That is exactly why I disagree with you. So, where the quotation in that post says: "It is often incorrectly assumed that a good’s market price measures its economic value. However, the market price only tells us the minimum amount that people who buy the good are willing to pay for it. When people purchase a marketed good, they compare the amount they would be willing to pay for that good with its market price. They will only purchase the good if their willingness to pay is equal to or greater than the price. Many people are actually willing to pay more than the market price for a good, and thus their values exceed the market price" ... it doesn't even mention price?Look, let's leave alone your deficiencies in economics, can you tell the difference between zero and six?As for the other quotations in that post, I'm not sure that your argument holds water. Suppose you said that a giraffe was a reptile. Then I provide three quotes from zoologists saying that it's a mammal. Would it be a snappy comeback to say: "That little snip doesn't even mention reptiles. It's clearly not trying to say anything about reptiles"?No, two people I quoted explaining the concept of value in neoclassical economics don't even mention price. That should actually tell you something. Instead, they're talking about utility. They are indeed "not trying to say anything" about ways in which you might choose to be wrong. Why would they? They've never met you or heard of you. When they explain the concept of value in neoclassical economics, they don't even have to refer to any mistakes which some guy called Percy who they've never heard of made somewhere on the internet after they published their webpages. If your lack of status as an acknowledged giant of economic theory didn't clinch it for them, then the fact that they don't own a time machine would surely be the deciding factor.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

No, you said it would cause an increase in its value. Which is clearly what Jon is objecting to. Can you find anyone who says that it has no value? I would advise you not to make obviously false statements about my clearly expressed opinions. If considerations of your personal integrity do not suggest this to you, then there is also the fact that you're going to be found out. Do you suppose that nonsense like this is going to impress Jon, who can read what I've actually written? No, that's how to jack up the price.

Oh, goodness, did the rest of the internet say I was wrong? Then I wonder how it is that I managed to find articles on the internet agreeing with me, and you just keep harking back to that same Wikipedia article. I'm sure that other people besides me have read the same economics textbooks. They can't have published them just for me. That would be ... well, for starters it would be uneconomical. You see where people explaining neoclassical economics say that value is to be equated with utility? I said what is it, not where. And the answer is obvious. It's the increment in revenue compared with what they would have gotten without any software. And yet curiously enough companies do not select their strategies solely on that basis. They do not say: "Well, since just looking at the figure stating our revenue doesn't tell us how we made our money, we have no idea how we did it, so we might as well just act at random. Next fiscal year, therefore, our strategy will be to dress up as clowns and throw custard pies at our prospective customers, because for all we know by looking at the one figure that constitutes our bottom line this might work just as well as anything else." You're serious?There is "no indication anywhere" of what business decisions make money?Then does the board of directors get paid the big bucks for their powers of spinning a dreidel, or for their skill at doing "eenie-meenie-minie-mo", or what? Only if so I think I should like that job, since I can flip a coin with the best of 'em.Really, you have to deny that it's possible for businessmen to gauge the value of anything at all just so's you can deny that they can gauge the value of free software to their company? You'll throw out an ocean of bathwater just so you can get rid of one little baby?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Simply investing doesn't boost the productivity. It's when people have an idea and get someone to invest in it that it can boost productivity. We can't measure whether having the idea or investing in it yields more of the increase in productivity.So why is the increase in productivity credited entirely to the investors? They already get 99.9% of the profit, why do they also have to get all the credit?

And to prevent any further ambiguity, confusion or dissent, you could use the term price instead of value, since that is apparently what you mean by it.Unless, of course, the creation of ambiguity is necessary to your argument.

So does "value in trade" mean "average price within a region"? So ... if by advertising Chevy only increases their volume of sales, while leaving the price of one of their trucks the same, have they increased the "value in trade" of a Chevy truck?

Well then, naturally they'd shift their purchasing behavior to other goods that were better value for money. For example, suppose that due to a failure of this year's bean harvest, the prices and sales of beans were as follows: We can see that the value of a bag of beans is 293. If therefore, a customer switches from buying a bag of peas on sale at 80 to buying a bag of beans at 270, he is getting better value for money. However, when the price of peas goes back up after the Christmas sale, the value/price ratio of peas and beans will be the same again, and beans will no longer be the better buy --- they're only better value for money than cut-price peas.This shows the importance of a good education in economics. A naive customer might blunder into a supermarket and think that just because peas are over three times cheaper than beans, they're better value for money. How wrong he would be.Unfortunately, a lot of customers are naive. Perhaps we should come up with some economic concept that allows us to explain and model the behavior of those customers who sedulously insist on wasting their money on the low-value peas rather than thriftily spending it on the high-value beans. Alas, we can't call it "value for money", because Percy has dibs on the word "value".

Hence the idea of marginal value which lies at the heart of neoclassical economics. Oxygen is of great value to me; more oxygen than I have is not.

So when we're talking about creating value, then value is price?Or not?Really, you start a thread on "how much is something worth", and yet it has been very hard to get any sort of operational definition out of you.

Just as you wouldn't say that the mass of a hamburger and the mass of Jupiter are completely different things? After all, they can both be denominated in tonnes. That is not exactly what you've been "saying throughout this thread". But let's let that pass.What are you saying? Let's overlook the times that you've said things that you later maintained that you're not saying. What would you in fact like to say?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But don't the people who have good ideas deserve some of the credit for having them?When there are more workers than jobs, do you give the Human Resources Department all the credit for the goods produced by the workers they choose to hire? It is true that the onus is on them to pick and choose who to hire, but also the workers have to do some actual work, for which they surely deserve some credit.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Just that --- they deserve some of the credit. Actually, what the pharaohs got was what they deserved, namely the blame. The names of Khufu and Khefren were a hissing and a byword for millennia, and serves 'em right. I was talking there about ordinary workers, not ideas-men. It was an analogy.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.