A Measured Post About Measuring Value
Start here . You can work backwards from that post to earlier ones in the conversation, if you would like to do so. What to make of all this? First of all, philosophically speaking , Mises is correct: acts of valuation are not measuring anything. If I part with $40 for a steak dinner, I have not "measured" the value of the dollars or the dinner. I have made a judgment that I prefer the dinner to the $40, but a judgment is not a measurement. (I can of course, make judgments about measurements: "I think Bill is twice as tall as Joe." But that is not a measurement itself either.) In fact, I think we can go further, and declare we have no particular reason to endorse Mises' claim that acts of choice place "all values on a single scale." Consider Socrates, sitting in his cell awaiting death, with the opportunity to escape before him. Mises' claim seems to imply that if Socrates had merely been offered enough olive oil and retsina, he would h...