Q: “Curt: What is the unit of account according to which the spectrum of demonstrated interests is commensurable? Pricing these areas of dispute doesn’t seem to be an exact science.“
Great question.
There are no utils nor prices in subjective value – just voluntary reciprocity or not. This is because time is the universal asset of scarcity, and time is of different value at different times in different circumstances to each of us. And all demonstrated interests (from concrete to abstract objects) store different amounts of relative time. This is the reason for subjective value and the variation in subjective value by time, place, individual, and his inventory.
So the only means of testing value is voluntary transfer (exchange). Because all individuals use personal weights and measures. As such it’s the ACTION(change) of exchange not the STATE of the asset or demonstrated interests that provides us with information.
All we know is that people seek to acquire, preserve, transform, trade, and consume demonstrated interests as a means of defeating entropy in time.
So we can catalog demonstrated interest by empirical observation(we have). Because people seek to acquire and defend demonstrated interests. And they seek restitution, punishment and prevention of those demonstrated interests when that interest is violated. In other words this is a purely empirical (scientific) question. (Empirical means observable and recordable).
And we can observe that all human behavior is reducible to statements of acquiring, preserving, transforming, exchanging, and consuming demonstrated interests.
So contrary to Utils and Prices, which are cardinal measures, human behavior is measured ordinally by ordinal name (term, not number), and determined by triangulation, not cardinal position or number.
And cardinal measures such as prices are the floating measure of relative value in markets (populations) of distributed interest in goods, services, information, or opportunity, whether private, semi-private, or common.
Prices only aggregate a distribution of the value of time to individuals that produces a voluntary exchange, and not a universal value or absolute measure of anything.
Cheers
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
The Science of Cooperation
