Summations Only

Are you just conflating different definitions of "value"?

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In ethics, value is a property of objects, including physical objects as well as abstract objects (e.g. actions), representing their degree of importance.

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Value - Wikipedia(ethics)

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An economic value is the worth of a good or service as determined by the market.

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Value - Wikipedia(economics)

It has to do with your claim that I live in a fantasy world because I believe there are such things as freely accessible resources.The fact that freely accessible resources exist in this very worldthe one we all live indemonstrates quite clearly that your claim is nonsense and that my 'fantasy' is indeed quite real.You can pretend you never made that claim if you want, though... I'll forget it happened. Jon

Good ol' pop-culture economics again. Nonsensical accounting slogans with no actual relationship to the real world.

There's more to it than that... You're just isolating your claim from any context so you can believe that you were right about something. If you follow the exchange, you can see that you're not really making sense: Unless you're actually claiming that owners of capital are blockades to your access to oxygen, sunlight, and friends. People having money isn't the reason you don't have friends, Jon People having money doesn't blockade you from sunlight and air. The fact that you're not blockaded from sunlight and air doesn't mean that you are contributing to wealth. Nested Quotes Alert! Please edit wiserEdited by AdminPhat, : phat-o-gram

You never did show me the Real Economics^TM...

Of course I'm not claiming such a thing. How could you possibly get this from what I have said? Sunlight, oxygen, and friendship are examples of freely accessible resourcesthere are no blockades to them.But none of this addresses the fact that the man who loans the money contributes nothing whatsoever to wealth creation. If the resource that are owned by the people you are trying to buy them from (that's why you need a loan, right?) were freely accessible, you wouldn't need to pay those people for them and you wouldn't need a loan so you wouldn't need to pay the interest on that loan either.The fact that you have to jump through all these price hoops to realize your great idea shows that capital ownership is a hindrance to wealth creation; owners of capital do not help motivate wealth creation, they stall it at every stage by constantly extorting money out of the people aactually responsible for the wealth ceration.

But if he didn't loan the money, then no wealth could have been created. And if a frog had wings then he wouldn't bump his ass when he hopped. But that is a fantasy world. People own those resources and they cost money.Of course if everything was free then we wouldn't need to borrow people's wealth to create stuff, but that's neither here nor there. No, I get what your saying. Its just that you have to compare reality to fantasy in order for your conclusion to follow.Ya know, if the world was really cold outside all the time, then my beer would be cold too. You see, the refrigerator is actually a hinderance to making my beer colder. Edited by Catholic Scientist, : spalling

If you need capital (usually money) to start a business, then you must pay interest on the capital you borrow. Interest provides incentive for the owner of the capital to put it at risk. The degree of risk governs the amount of interest.Another way of providing capital is by selling shares in the start-up business. This is called venture capital. Those providing the capital receive shares in the business. The risk is high, but so are the potential rewards.No one makes capital available for free.--Percy

No. Ethics hardly comes into it. Free software might be used by SPECTRE in their quest for world domination, which would be a bad thing, but it would still be valuable to them. But if you go on reading, you'll see that there is no unanimity amongst economists that economic value is the same thing as price. And I think I have shown good reasons why. It seems absolutely paradoxical to maintain that free software has no economic value because you don't have to pay for it. To be sure, it has no economic value to the producer, who is giving it away, but it has value to the consumers, who are (one assumes) more productive for having software than if they had none.WP goes on to say: The software is valuable in this sense. The fact that it is free does not remove its value, that's the icing on the cake.

All value judgements are subjective.All value assessment is made relative to need. If you don't need a thing, or any benefit that it can provide, then it has no value to you . So the value of any particular thing changes with every observer.I assess value as a function of time invested and resources consumed with personal need as a multiplier. By this mechanism, a glass of water can carry more value than all the fine art in the world, to the thirsty man.In the end, the only currency that anyone really has is their time.

It looks like it. From the quote in the OP:

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Economic value is one of many possible ways to define and measure value. Although other types of value are often important, economic values are useful to consider when making economic choices — choices that involve tradeoffs in allocating resources.

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emphasis addedTo have Economics, you need an exchange of resources. Value outside of an exchange of resources doesn't get accounted for when measuring economic activity.So for the free software, no doubt it has value to the country's economy, but without a price, and therefore without an Economic Value, its not going to be accounted for when measuring things like the GDP.So if your talking about contributions to the GDP as measured, free software is going to be zero, even though we all know that it does contribute somehow. Its just that its not accounted for in the measurement. You have, and I don't doubt that there's different economic theories with different definitions of "value". That depends on what "having no economic value" means. It doesn't mean that it doesn't have any value to the economy. When they calculate the GDP, do you think they're using that classical economics, or this neoclassical one?:

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Neoclassical economics is a term variously used for approaches to economics focusing on the determination of prices, outputs, and income distributions in markets through supply and demand, often mediated through a hypothesized maximization of utility by income-constrained individuals and of profits by cost-constrained firms employing available information and factors of production, in accordance with rational choice theory.

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This is just the western world economics-as-accounting version of how things go.Do you think the economies in the jungles of South America operate with interest, shares, and venture capital?Basic economic principles like worth and value should be far more universal than this. As I pointed out to CS, there are plenty of very valuable resources that are 100% freely available. And the way to make them freely available is to simply not have anyone own them.

That's so naive it's cute.

I suggest we focus on the method of accounting used when calculating the GDP shown in this graph and used as the basis for the claim that the rich are appropriating to themselves a disproportionate share: --PercyAbE: I just realized that nitpickers might focus on my wording. It was intended as a brief reference to the claim that the rich are appropriating to themselves a disproportionate share of the contributions of productivity that rightfully belongs to others. Clearly the rich possess a disproportionate share of the income, and probably of wealth, too, though that isn't shown on the graph.Edited by Percy, : AbE.

Right. So when a company decides to allocate a little time in installing Open Office, rather than a little time and a lot of money in installing Microsoft Office, that's a "choice that involves tradeoffs in allocating resources". This choice is not made on the basis that Open Office has no economic value because it's free.In general, when people make such decisions, they do not equate economic value with price, because if they did, as I have pointed out, they would find that any purchase gave them equal value for money. I don't know exactly how GDP is calculated, but if this is true, I would say --- what of it? The question of whether it has economic value has nothing to do with whether someone using a particular method of accounting takes this value into account.If I maintained that it required intelligence to learn a foreign language, would it be a good refutation to reply that IQ tests don't measure this capacity? I might say --- well then, so much the worse for IQ tests. But that is patently what it means. If you mean something different, such as that it is free of charge, then you should say that.Why muck about with language in this way? We have words, such as "price" which mean things such as price. Nothing but confusion, ambiguity, and nonsense is produced by equating value with price. I know what neoclassical economics is. I have proved several original theorems in that particular branch of mathematics.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.