Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
view the rest of the comments
It seems like you don't understand the difference between use value and exchange value (price).
LTV is concerned primarily with use value, i.e. the substantive qualities which make a commodity useful. Marginalism is concerned exclusively with exchange value, i.e. the subjective price associated with that commodity in the market.
Marginalism is a circular argument: value is determined by price, price comes from value. It doesn't replace LTV, it just ignores use value.
And really, when you look under the hood, the "scarcity" it uses to justify prices is just labor in disguise. Why do diamonds sell at a higher price than water even though water is more valuable? Because diamonds are more scarce than water. Why are diamonds more scarce than water? Because it takes more labor to locate, extract, and refine diamonds than it does to find water.
Price is not value. Price is a signal associated with value. Marginalism doesn't describe value, it describes price. It has no ability to explain the origin of value, it simply ignores that question because the answer is inconvenient, and tries to hide that fact with sanitized obfuscating words like "scarcity".
Value ≠ price. Agreed.
Disagree. Imagine I'm on an island. I have a stream with running water. However, every time I need to take a sip, I have to bend down.
The price of taking a sip = bending down once.
The value of taking that sip has diminishing returns. I might be very thirsty. Hence, I would readily take 10 sips. However, with every sip, my thrist reduces. Hence, the value of that additional sip reduces. The price however stays the same (bending down once per sip). Eventually, the value becomes too little for the price. I stop.
LTV's math would tell me that the value of that sip is equal to the amount of labor I put into it. Meaning, its value stays the same and increases over time as bending down repeatedly means more exhaustion, hence more labor. You can't invoke socially necessary labor here either. There's no society. There's just me. Economics is the study of resource distribution. The amount of agents working and wanting is irrelevant.
My previous example shows why this is a misunderstanding.
Sometimes, yes (determined by labor costs).
Valuable according to whom? Using what math?
No. You also need to specify units of both. How much water? How many diamonds?
I spent one hour extracting an ugly diamond. I spent another hour extracting a beautiful diamond. I spent one hour for both. The labor for both was the same. Is the value for both the same?
No. My poop (poop generated only by me, nobody else) is way more scarce than diamonds. Is it priced in the millions? Sadly, no. Scarcity doesn't alone decide both value and price. Value is decided subjectively. I love coffee. I value it highly. My friend hates coffee. She doesn't value it. Price is determined by what needs to be sacrificed to obtain what is valued.