The Iron Law Theory of Value
Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2023 3:18 am
Fox has performed some material services for people in my near social network, which we can all easily see are valuable and for which we don't have a good alternative provider (e.g. lovingly touching people and doing other similar things they missed from their mothers). Since most of us aren't able to reciprocate in kind, we've been thinking about whether we can pay Fox for their services.
Cat has tried to give Fox a gift of a significant amount of money, but Fox doesn't have a bank account, and thinks that the reconfiguration of identity necessary to have a bank account would destroy the capacities we're trying to pay for. This is consistent with the observed fact that those of us who do have bank accounts have difficulty reciprocating in kind!
Star has *not* attempted any similarly large act of reciprocation, but somehow I have the impression that there's currently a better chance that Star would repay Fox, than that Cat would. Why?
Cat's lived with Fox for over a year, and - by both our accounts - mostly failed to talk with Fox at all about Fox's perspective. When I recently tried to give Cat some advice about how they might better extract information from Fox, I was initially met with a wall of defensiveness rather than the kind of interest that would be justified by someone offering a potential solution to a problem. For the most part I don't even see Cat acknowledge Fox's physical presence, which is core to how Fox communicates and understands theirself. By contrast, even though Star is confused about many things, it seems to me that Star is more visibly aware of Fox as a person at all, in ways that relate to Fox's needs as Fox understands them. For instance, on more than one occasion, Star has asked to hold, touch, or otherwise interact with Fox's baby, which is a form of help Fox can receive without becoming someone else.
The implied definition of payment I've been using is: When you pay for a good or service, you are offering meaningful help reproducing the kind of person who provided that good or service.
We can think of this as a consequence of the Iron Law of Wages, that under competitive conditions, in the long run, the wages of any type of work will converge towards the minimum required to successfully reproduce workers with the required skills and inclinations. Alternatively, we can think of the Iron Law of Wages as an ecological definition of economic value: the provision of scarce resources which help the recipient reproduce.
Cat has tried to give Fox a gift of a significant amount of money, but Fox doesn't have a bank account, and thinks that the reconfiguration of identity necessary to have a bank account would destroy the capacities we're trying to pay for. This is consistent with the observed fact that those of us who do have bank accounts have difficulty reciprocating in kind!
Star has *not* attempted any similarly large act of reciprocation, but somehow I have the impression that there's currently a better chance that Star would repay Fox, than that Cat would. Why?
Cat's lived with Fox for over a year, and - by both our accounts - mostly failed to talk with Fox at all about Fox's perspective. When I recently tried to give Cat some advice about how they might better extract information from Fox, I was initially met with a wall of defensiveness rather than the kind of interest that would be justified by someone offering a potential solution to a problem. For the most part I don't even see Cat acknowledge Fox's physical presence, which is core to how Fox communicates and understands theirself. By contrast, even though Star is confused about many things, it seems to me that Star is more visibly aware of Fox as a person at all, in ways that relate to Fox's needs as Fox understands them. For instance, on more than one occasion, Star has asked to hold, touch, or otherwise interact with Fox's baby, which is a form of help Fox can receive without becoming someone else.
The implied definition of payment I've been using is: When you pay for a good or service, you are offering meaningful help reproducing the kind of person who provided that good or service.
We can think of this as a consequence of the Iron Law of Wages, that under competitive conditions, in the long run, the wages of any type of work will converge towards the minimum required to successfully reproduce workers with the required skills and inclinations. Alternatively, we can think of the Iron Law of Wages as an ecological definition of economic value: the provision of scarce resources which help the recipient reproduce.