Aristotle’s value

Jun 18, 2013 by admin    No Comments    Posted under: Inspiring The Entrepreneur, Qhaosing drops

One of the greatest revolutions in economics was the discovery that “value” is not an attribute of things per se but, rather, an assessment made by the person for whom the thing appears to be valuable. Beginning with Aristotle, economists believed that “value” was an objective quality such as size, weight, or material composition. This thinking culminated with Karl Marx, who argued that “the labor incorporated in the good” was what made it valuable .

They were all wrong.

A computer might be valuable to you because you don’t have one, but worthless to me because I have two. Neither of us is “wrong,” because the computer does not have an intrinsic value; it only has value for a particular person at a particular time under particular conditions. No matter how much effort the producer of the computer put into it, it’s still worthless to me.

[by Fred Cofman, executive coach & philosopher]

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