From: Ian Wright (iwright@GMAIL.COM)
Date: Thu Jun 17 2004 - 16:24:54 EDT
Hi Paul, Howard > In your reply, value is both a real object and a theoretical object. > You are having your cake and eating it, too. Maybe things would be clearer if the term "value" was replaced by "law of value", because the latter term reminds us that it is a social process we are talking about, and avoids reification. The "law of value" is both a theory and a real process. Just like the "law of gravity" is a description of a real mechanism that exists independently of our knowledge of it. (There are certain objective conditions that need to be met in order for the emergence of the law of value to be a real possibility. People seem to argue whether those conditions must include a market in labour or not. I view some of my computational experiments an existence proof that it does not. It would be nice to perform some economic experiments with real people in the laboratory, and determine whether the law of value emerges in this setting also. A brief perusal of some of the work in experimental economics suggests that the law of value would naturally emerge with a small group of people interacting over a network and pretending to make and trade commodities. The form of this argument is not if EV then V, but if X,Y and Z then the law of value emerges. It is deductive, not inductive.) ATB, -Ian.
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