@Venkat – Value is entirely subjective and ordinal in ranking. Price is something you will only see when a trade takes place between you and someone or something else; here both parties will try to gain net value. The only thing I can tell about someone else is that what they’re giving up is of less value to them than what they’re getting.

A parasite would thus take actions to increase his net value. On the whole the term is “value”-laden. The difference between a parasite and a predator is that the parasite takes a small part of an individual prey. The predator kills a small part of the herd. Would you rather have a tapeworm or be eaten by a lion? 🙂 Or would humanity as a whole rather be tapeworm free but have a few eaten by lions?

Money is simply a technology to facilitate trade. Some technologies are better than others. Gold can’t be inflated but it’s only slightly more useful than paper with pictures of dead presidents on them (it’s not an industrial commodity). Silver has actual use value.

A lot of the value I create for myself is not intended to be exchanged, so money would make no sense. For instance, I can avoid spending $150 by fixing my own toilet. However, this does not mean that someone paid me $150 which I can now save in my bank account. It may also be that I feel a certain sense of accomplishment by fixing it myself. It may be that I fixed it on a Sunday where no plumber was available. Such a fix is almost priceless. Most importantly, you can’t put a value on my toilet repair, only I can.

I suspect you’re still leaning towards not considering value (subjective ranking), price (objective ranking requiring a trade), and money (technology used in trade) as three distinct concepts.

Here’s an alternative money technology. Everybody are to perform jumping jacks instead of paying with money. We can set a $1=N jumps exchange rate for the transition. However, such a economy would work (although it would look quite different from one where banks create credit) because the ability and desire to perform jumping jacks is a limited resource and prices would adjust to according to people’s stamina. You do to some extend already see thing phenomena with World of Warcraft gold. It has an exchange rate and an exchange rate determined by how willing some people are to goldfarm (perform jumping jacks).

everything can be reduced to a single variable called “the price”.

I would say:

everything can be reduced to a single variable called “THE PROFIT”.

Also, for me, ERE is about getting more time. E.g., selling less of my time. Because if I sell it, I can’t have it fully. People say that time is money. I’d rather say that time is life. I prefer my life that the money I get from selling it.

So I would say that ERE X is time. Some may say that it is freedom. Maybe it’s freedom to use your time indeed.

Ah, the “vector” that is distinct from price…
You can take the physicist out of the uni but you can’t take the physics out of the physicist.

I agree that such a vector, arising from one’s own acts of production, exists. It could be the satisfaction of self-sufficiency and the degree of freedom that it signifies. It could be the self-knowledge that one has increased his or her mastery of a productive activity. There’s a reason Aunt Mable wants to win the blue ribbon for her apricot pie at the county fair and it has nothing to do with money.

I don’t fault Venkat for avoiding the distinction. As Surio has pointed out on Venkat’s blog, he is looking for other solutions to the dysfunctionality of the workplace and the operations of the information economoy than ERE. And as Jacob observes, value is a subjective quality. To take a simple example, the hedonic value of a hot shower to me is of such abiding quality that I will gladly pay a higher natural gas bill to ensure a piping hot, 10-minute shower every day. Clearly, Jacob would not assign the same value to it. But the ERE philosophy allows both of us to pursue lives that maximize our individual pursuit of disparate values.

@Maus,
Bingo! Point well made on “value” and its role in driving humans (Go Auntie Mable! ;-))! Excellent :-).

Re: the “vector” LOL! I suspect what Jacob intends to highlight is the {{homeoletic}} response towards life goals, but a Vector serves as an immediate construct that most people can intuitively relate to.

@Dienekes,
Did you have something like this scenario playing out in mind when you wrote that? 😉

I write jazzy Javascript-y web pages for X, and X then sells a few “great” mortgage loans to Y, and then Y buys some great movies from netflix, etc., etc., etc., …. all of this is throwing a lot of “money” in some denomination or another into the GDP equation, but don’t really produce anything of lasting(#) value?

(#) I know ‘value’ is subjective, therefore I added “lasting” there

I have a hard time understanding “net value” in our society. People pay for food to eat and get energy calories from. They then pay a gym to work off those calories in an unproductive, repetitive manner. The net value actually results in a double negative. This is akin to paying to put gas in one’s car, then taking it to a place and paying them to lift in on a hoist, turn it on, and spin the wheels in the air all day hoping to burn off the fuel. However, most regular folk see “value” in eating and a “value” in buying a gym membership. (Instead of using the fuel to do something productive.) This insanity makes me conclude that “value” is a purely arbitrary, subjective term which doesn’t have to add up properly on a spreadsheet. This highly offends the maths in my brain.