Cal: I’m a degreed economist. I speak as a member of the economic profession.

Congratulations, kid, but speaking as a member of the profession is not the same thing as speaking for it. In this case you are clearly advocating a view of value which is distinct from that of praxeological theories such as Mises’s and Rothbard’s. (Mises would argue that predecessors like Menger also, at least implicitly, advocated a praxeological view of value at odds with the view that you are advancing; whether that interpretive claim is right or not, the point is that at least some of the folks you claim to be speaking for here do not actually accept the way you are trying to formulate things.)

Cal: All significant, modern economic schools (as in post-Keynes) are conceptually founded on marginalism

That’s fascinating. But since I just told you that my purpose here has nothing to do with arguing against marginalism (or, for that matter, against subjective theories of value), why are you telling me this?

Cal: When Mises is talking about “value for the purposes of economics,” he is not talking about value qua value – he is talking about the revelation of value.

Again, Cal, Mises does not accept the legitimacy of the distinction that you are trying to make between “value qua value” and “the revelation of value.” This is a distinction that you would like to make; it is not a distinction that Mises accepts. (In fact, it is part and parcel of Mises’s conception of praxeology that he rejects it.) You may think that there is some secret meaning behind the phrase “have no independent existence” which allows you to attribute to Mises a view on which value actually can be characterized as existing independently of comparison amongst an ordinally ranked system of alternatives, but I don’t know why you expect anyone to take such a claim seriously.

Cal: the point of revelation vs. more fundamental thing is made

That may be your point. It’s not Von Mises’s. Again, he makes it quite clear in the opening conceptual analysis of action and of value that he rejects the notion of a “more fundamental thing” to value than value-as-revealed-preference. Perhaps you think that this point needs to be made because you have confused an account of value-formation with a conceptual analysis of value per se — that is, committed a rather crude genetic fallacy — and supposed that, since Von Mises isn’t addressing value-formation in his remarks, he must be addressing something “less fundamental” when he discusses revealed value. But if so, you’ve simply missed the import of his argument on a very fundamental point.

Cal: There is a difference between claiming that labor-entailment may tend to affect subjective valuation (still an essentially nonsensical claim) and stating that it does, unqualified. Check basic logic on modality here.

Well, no. You might want to consider the form of statement that Thompson (2008) calls an “Aristotelian categorical” — for example, “Cats have four legs” or “The human female gives birth to live young” — as well as other common related usages, such as “Eating cheese makes me feel sick” or “Cats like me.” If you ever spend much time on the logic of modal terms, you may come to see that there are actually lots of things asserted in a categorical mode which state a real relationship but do not actually involve either a claim of necessity, or a claim of actual universality.

Cal: Also, stating that “costs” in the broad sense of the word affect subjective valuation is meaningless. Cost, disutility, is also subjective.

I’m aware that cost is subjective. You might have gleaned the fact that I’m aware of it from the fact that I said as much in the note you’re supposedly replying to. Before you begin your next lecture, you might want to take the time to read what people are telling you.

The reason I brought it up is because you made a statement which was oversimplified to the point of being extremely misleading (“Nothing does necessarily affect subjective valuation. It is 100% subjective”). Either this claim means (1) that nothing necessarily affects the subjective valuation of a single marginal good, considered in isolation from other concurrent valuations — in which case the claim is flatly false, since economic rationality requires that concurrent valuations (including the valuation of costs) form a consistent preference-ordering; or else (2) that nothing other than other subjective valuations affects the system of subjective valuations as a whole — in which case the claim is vacuously true (because any mental state which necessarily affects the system of subjective valuations becomes counted as part of that system, just by that very fact), but non-responsive, since it doesn’t actually do anything to refute or even to complicate Marja’s point about costs.

Cal: The attempt does not, at all, in any way, presuppose anything about the fundamental nature of the formation of value.

I didn’t say that your attempted distinction presupposed something about “the fundamental nature of the formation of value.” I certainly realize that Mises didn’t say anything in the passage I quoted about value-formation, but then, neither have I. What I said was about Mises’s view on what it means to say that Jones economically values X. Not his view on how Jones forms that value for X.

Cal: Mises is not saying value is comparative, he is saying that it is revealed comparatively (ordinally) and subjectively.

You’re asserting this, but where’s your argument? I gave you specific passages of text in which Mises straightforwardly says that for the purposes of economics value does not exist independently of the revealing of comparative preferences in action. Not that it isn’t known by third parties; that it has no independent existence. For Mises, there just is nothing for economics to talk about separate from actual or hypothetical revealed values. (Which, necessarily, express a consistent ordinal ranking. Among other things.) Of course, you can agree or disagree with Mises’s views about the conceptual analysis of value — it certainly sounds like you are more interested in the sort of psychologistic perspective that Mises rejected — but then you should perhaps speak only for yourself, and not for “all modern economics,” or for all proponents of the subjective theory of value.

As for explaining marginalism 101 to me, you can save yourself the effort. I already understand how that works. My comments here have nothing to do with rejecting marginal utility theory.

Cal: No, Marja, labor-entailment does not necessarily affect subjective valuation.

1. She didn’t say it “necessarily affects subjective valuation.” She said it does affect it. Note the difference in modality. One can correctly assert that a general tendency obtains without claiming that it is a necessary or conceptual truth.

2. However, I will also note that, given the meaning of the term “cost,” basic requirements of rationality do require that costs have a certain bearing on value-ordering. (For something to count as a cost is for it to lower a state of affairs in an actor’s preference order, ceteris paribus. If it did not, then it must not really be a cost for that economic subject.) Hence there are at least some factors that necessarily affect subjective valuations — among them costs — because they are themselves already part of subjective valuations, and valuations, to count as valuations, must be part of a consistent ordering.

Cal,

I won’t presume to speak for “all modern economics.” (My own education in economics is mainly in the Austrian tradition.) But I will say that you have evidently misunderstood Von Mises and Rothbard if you think that they are claiming the same thing that you say they are claiming. You have repeatedly attempted to distinguish the revealing of value in action and the value itself — an attempt which presupposes that you have some clear concept of what it is for to value X which can be characterized independently of the revealing of a preference of X over Y, in the context of a choice, as if you could somehow understand the value that Jones attaches to X without having considered whether he would prefer X over alternatives given the choice. If you’ll re-read the line in Von Mises that you yourself bolded, you’ll find that that presupposition is precisely what Von Mises denies. The entire point of his discussion is that an understanding of value — in the sense of “value” relevant to economics — only falls out of an analysis of purposive choices among alternatives. There are other senses of value which he considers, some of which are comparative (e.g. wishing) and others of which may not be (e.g. psychological attitudes, such as having feelings of pleasure or admiration), but the point of considering these alternative senses of “to value” is to show that they are not the sorts of valuing that (Von Mises holds) are studied by the science of economics.

Cal: Charles, you’ve missed the point entirely …

Maybe so, but I can’t see how the passage you’ve bolded would show me that. Von Mises conceives of “the actual behavior of individuals” in terms of the selection of more highly valued states of affairs over less highly valued states of affairs, as he says in the passage I quoted further down. To say that a scale of values has no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals is to say that it has no independent existence apart from the revealed comparative preference for one state of affairs over another. (Any other sense of valuing is, for Von Mises, not part of the subject-matter of praxeology.) Hence, Von Mises’s understanding of “value” in economics is explicitly comparative, not a matter of appreciating or admiring a thing or a state of affairs in isolation from comparisons to alternative states of affairs. Just what do you think I am missing?

Cal: think about your question…

I don’t think I had a question, except to ask Kyle for the sources from which he was drawing his view of what senses of “value” are relevant to subjectivist economics. (Because that view of the matter seems, to my best understanding, rather idiosyncratic, and directly in conflict with the versions presented in, e.g., Von Mises and Rothbard.)

Marja: The first meaning [of ” to value”] being to admire, or to appreciate [sans the price-finding meaning of appreciate!]… The second meaning being to compare one good to another.

Kyle Bennett: Marja, values are not ordinal (nor are they cardinal), they are non-numerically defined. As Cal said, they are ranked ordinally only when comparisons become necessary. How one does that is purely subjective and not subject to external analysis…. There’s only one meaning relevant to subjective value economics. …. Your second meaning is not in any way, shape, or form part of valuation under the STV.

Kyle,

Could you tell me what version of subjective value theory you are reading that tells you that the concept of “value” in marginalist economics is not comparative? Looking briefly at a couple of sources, I find that Ludwig von Mises tells us (in Human Action I.IV.2 that “one must not forget that the scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action. These scales have no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals. The only source from which our knowledge concerning these scales is derived is the observation of a man’s [sic] actions. Every action is always in perfect agreement with the scale of values or wants because these scales are nothing but an instrument for the interpretation of a man’s [sic] acting.” Earlier, we are told (in I.I, “Acting Man” [sic] that action is always an expression of preferences (hence necessarily comparative) — that “Acting man [sic] is eager to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory. His mind imagines conditions which suit him better, and his action aims at bringing about this desired state. The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness ” Von Mises argues that only this sort of comparative valuing (as opposed to other things which you might call “valuing,” such as idle wishes or moral doctrines) is relevant to economics, since economics is the science of human action.

Similarly, at the beginning of “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,” Rothbard tells us that “Individual valuation is the keystone of economic theory. For, fundamentally, economics does not deal with things or material objects. Economics analyzes the logical attributes and consequences of the existence of individual valuations. … But the essence and the driving force of human action, and therefore of the human market economy, are the valuations of individuals. Action is the result of choice among alternatives, and choice reflects values, that is, individual preferences among these alternatives.” [emphasis mine]

Whatever valuation in Marja’s first sense may be, it is not the sort of value that prominent subjectivists have thought to be relevant to economics. They have, as far as I can tell, generally or exclusively argued that Marja’s second meaning of “to value,” not the first, is what’s relevant to the economic study of human action.