Topic: Is there such a thing as absolute value? - page 3. (Read 8167 times)

Do you realize you are justifying that food has subjective value? You are saying that food is valuable to humans because we need it. That is the exact definition of subjective value.

The farmer and his entire family will always need food, for the rest of his life at steady 4 to 12 hour intervals, and if he was too hungry to drive his daughter might just as well have died.

Just because I currently value a bitcoin as worth more than 5 breads does not mean bitcoin is more valuable as a commodity. Bitcoin has no value for most people in the world.
I will always need bread, even if my internet access is cut off or there is a massive shortage of electricity, I'll manage without bitcoin.

However, you or I can't manage without bread or other food. We can manage without bitcoins. Hence bitcoin has subjective value (up to market to decide) but food is always worth *something*.

If fuel runs out globally, cars become worthless. If there is an attack on electricity networks, all gadgets become useless.
But food can't become useless as long as someone is alive.

Some gold nuts like to believe that the value of gold is constant. While that may subjectively be true to them, in practice its buying power is always in a state of flux. For various reasons though, those swings in buying power do tend to be much smaller than what we see with other precious metals such as silver or platinum group metals, as well as with base metals like copper, aluminum or nickel. No single material has a perfectly constant buying power, but some do exhibit more stability than others. Aluminum was once considered a precious metal, now the streets are littered with it.

Sounds too anthropocentric for my taste.


And besides, would expect the physical requirements for keeping one alive would vary significantly from individual to individual, and external factors such as average daily temperature, amount of daily sunlight, oxygen percentage in the air etc would also shift those values around quite a bit...

Food has only temporary value as well. I just showed you that at some point food was less valued than a car. That is exactly the point, value is subjective: It depends on the needs and wants of a person, its not absolute.


This does not contradict at all that value is subjective.


I agree. This does not contradict that value is subjective.


You are defining absolute as subjetively valuable for all humans. Absolute value means that it does not depend on the subjective valuation of anyone. Yet, you keep repeating that food is valuable because people need it. That means subjectively valued by people.

Why would that be? There is economic demand for every element anyway. Of course, it would be very difficult technically to make such coins if you really tried.

The car has only temporary value because the farmer's daughter is sick. But when she gets better, the car becomes useless if the farmer's family doesn't need to travel or they are happy with horse carts or walking.

However, they will always need their harvest or other sources of food to stay alive. The need is constant as long as someone in the family is alive. Hence it is always worth a certain portion of their income that they are willing to part with (be it 2%, 5% or like in many poor countries, over 50% of their income will go into food)

Unless material replicators or other sources of synthetic food are invented, food will always be a commodity that has infinite demand (as opposed to other commodities which only have limited, increasing or diminishing demand, such as certain consumer goods) but only a limited supply.

You could argue Bitcoin and gold are limited in supply as well, which is true, but they do not have infinite demand over time (infinite meaning as long as humans are alive), at least yet. They are not essential to the vast majority of people.

Therefore a thing of absolute value must be something that has a worth for everyone.

What do we call them? Dirtcoins? I think if we do what you suggested, we will finally destroy this poor planet...

I donno... we might be able to create a unit of ... I won't say value, maybe worth would be a better word, defined as the chemicals required to keep one human alive for 1 day. This would be constant, at so many pounds of O₂, so many mL of Water, and various amounts of macro and micro nutrients.

As previously stated, though, once we had this constant, everything else would then shift in relation to it.

Just mint coins that contain every non-radioactive metal, in the proportions that they are found in the earth's crust. That should be close enough.

LOL, good point

This is aparently a very intuitive though, but only aparently, because it does not describe reality.

Lets try a very simple though experiment: Imagine a farmer with all his food necesities covered for months. Suddenly his daughter gets ill and he needs a car to take her to the doctor. But he does not have a car. Now someone comes and offers him a car and a lot of food. What do you think he will value more in that moment? Supposedly food has absolute value while the car does not, right? Still, he would choose the car. How can that be if food has absolute value?

In reality, what do you mean by food having absolute value?

I guess it might be possible to create a unit of absolute value.  But the price of everything in relation to it would always be shifting.

While necessities of life are never valueless, even in the case of something like air which we usually don't pay for, that's not quite the same as having a constant value in a monetary sense. How much water can you get for a pound of salt? Nobody can live without either, but their relative values are certainly not fixed in a monetary sense. No single commodity can serve as a reference value for everything else.

That's true. Everyone needs to eat something though, even the camel riding merchant with the single grape, or a baron at a banquet.
While food has relative value in these scenarios, food is worth *something* to everyone.

Bitcoins or gold bullion are only worth something to people who choose to buy them either as an investment, curiosity or shininess (gold).
Most people have no utility for either of them even if the market price is thousands of dollars.

However, every single person in the world has utility for food.

Some people would pay to have bugs moved as far as possible form them, while others consider bugs a nutritious meal, some people pay lots for fancy dishes, others vomit just thinking of eating such things; some people refuse to eat most types of food, including going hungry if that's the only choice; some people will eat anything that is at hand, but not lift a finger to go after food that is not avaiable. And besides personal taste and culture, value of things like food is severely influenced by supply and demand; a grape in the middle of the desert is worth way more than one in the middle of a banquet.

Necessities do have absolute value.

These include food, clean water and in some cases housing (though many people in the world live on the streets). People are always willing to invest a certain amount of their income in those things, because they are required for sustaining life (unless they are self-sufficient farmers). People that refuse to, will die, or will have to resort to the charity of others, or stealing.

Bitcoins, gold, home theatre systems, computers, jet ski's and desktop fans have only arbitrary value.
Anything beyond the initial cost of labor+materials is just a percieved value due to their utility, rarity, etc., but everyone in the world can survive without them and has survived for thousands of years.

Nobody can survive without nutrition or drink though.
Clothing and shelter are very critical needs as well, depending on the climate they might have absolute value as well (especially in colder countries).

I vote Yes. I know it's a short answer but this is not philosophical theory, it's reality. Even at the lower levels of an entropic Universe such as ours, you can measure everything as energy potential. Old books, old paper bills, aluminum coins, car fuel, uranium, plastic bottles, sugar, wood and the binding and unbinding of these items has a positive or negative energy cost.

If you want a grow, evolve and reproduce, you need to consume more energy than needed, such that everything on your immediate surroundings has an energy value associated with it, and you try to find the lower path of cost. There are localized reversals, or mitigated costs or even cost prevention reversals but in the end we have the topic at hand:
- to get a bitcoin, you must either go in line with everyone else that wants it NOW and pay the market price, or
- expend energy in the form of binded (coal, nuclear, oil) or continuous flow energy (solar, wind, hydro) and time (computation complexity) to obtain one

It is impossible to get bitcoins at no value, there is an absolute low level of energy that needs to go into the creation of a bitcoin, even abstracting time and everything else except radiated heat in the most efficient mining processor. Oh, and this base value grows with each difficulty step.

I made a post about this on my blog.  I think there can be, or at least a highly stable value:

http://www.thefashionablephilosopher.com/politics/a-monetary-unit/

No, there are two reasons for this. Neither determinism, nor truth does seem to exist. I know, it's a short answer, but you could write books on that and I don't intend to do so.

And then there are two other reasons, but I am not sure whether they apply to everything and I guess that's not what you meant when you wrote your question.
Values are also a lot (even more than one might think at the beginning) about psychology.
Values are not always about numbers, even when it comes to very basic goods.