Topic: Is there such a thing as absolute value? - page 4. (Read 8167 times)

Entropy-coin? Nice!


Hm, converting dollars, gold, carrots etc into a Planck based unit in such a way that their exchange rates are respected without the assistance of arbitrary constants? That does sound like an interesting challenge...

No.

Long answer: Value and price are different things. Price is the reflection of value. But things can have value and no price, for example something with emotional value that you refuse to sell (although some would say that the problem is that nobody has offered you a high enough price). Anyhow, the price is maybe the best reflection of value.

As someone has stated before, value is subjective. Value is a human decision, and its different for everyone. Without a human valuing it an object has no value.

And now answering your question: there is no absolute price. Everything floats in respect to other objects. You are always pricing things in another object. F.e.: I will change you one caw for three sheeps, I will change you this car for a sex night with your girlfriend (interesting valuation here), I will change you a computer for a $600, I will change you 10 euros for 1 bitcoin, etc... Because this can be a mess, people end up using one object as means of exchange and exchanging everything against this object. This has been many things, like tobaco, sea shells, salt, spices, etc... but universaly and cultures without contact have end up selecting precious metals, specially gold and silver, because of its qualities. This object its what we call money. The benefits of having a few objects acting as means of exchange is that it allows for economic calculation and a pricing system that is what allows economic coordination in the division of labour and allows human progress.

The concept of value you are probably referring to is purely subjective and therefore I think no absolute value can be defined. Things like gold for example have a reputation of being considered as valuable throughout the history but there were times and societies which did not value gold very much either.

If you are really looking for "absolute value" then you would have to resort to something based on physical laws because they at least seem to be the only thing absolute in this universe. Take for example energy for a non-inflating value system or entropy for an inflating one (good luck with creating a currency based on entropy )

Determining inflation. This is a very complicated problem, with many opinions on it.

Some people like to gather a large set of different goods which were similarly easy to produce in past and present, and then compare e.g. a median price. This is a method I would use.

But I am not an expert on this. Apparently, many institutions, especially governments, have an incentive to construct flawed methods of determining real value and thereby inflation -- to be able to hide it.

Is there somthing that never changes value, like somthing you could use to evaluate how much a currency is worth at any point in history without being relative to other currencies nor the price of a BigMac nor anything, somthing that has the same (non-zero) value for anyone at any point in history? Or you can't give somthing value without considering how it's value compares to the value of somthing else?