On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 7:28 PM, Charles Haynes <[email protected]> wrote: > "Value" is multidimensional and context dependent even for an individual. > The value of sleep, or food, varies quite a bit depending on how much I've > had recently. You can't actually reduce "value" to a single metric, whether > you call it money or anything else. > > Value, at least in my case, is also non-transitive, non-commutative, and > non-distributive.
Oh, I agree. Units of measure are inherently uni-dimensional. Saying, for example, that I have 1 litre is meaningless unless I specify whether it is water or petrol. That doesn't make it a useless concept, however. Another analogy:a tennis player uses intuition and reflex to outplay his opponent. The fact that he doesn't think about Newton's laws while he does it doesn't mean that physics cannot explain the motion of the ball. Economics is the study of value and value judgments which uses money as a unit of measure. Every time you make a value decision it _could_ be described in money terms. But whether you do or not, it still economics. -- b
