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2 results

  • 3 - Value and Price

  • Dave Elder-Vass, Loughborough University
  • Book:
    Inventing Value
    Published online:
    28 July 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022, pp 42-64

  • Summary

    This chapter introduces the notion of value as a normative concept, as the price that something ought to exchange at. This does not mean that there is only one price that is its value for everyone, as objectivist theories of value assume: each of us forms our own opinion of the value of a thing. However, there are social forces that tend to produce convergence in our valuations. Value is thus normative, as it is influenced by assessment of what is a just price, and these assessments themselves depend on social norms about valuation. Building critically on the economics of conventions school and recent sociological work on valuation as a process, the chapter explains these normative assessments in terms of what it calls lay theories of value: norms about the fair price of commodities. It then discusses how valuation contributes to price determination, as one of multiple mechanisms in open economic systems. The second section of the chapter introduces the critical realist view of causation that enables us to make sense of this role for theories of value.

Inventing Value
  • The Social Construction of Monetary Worth
  • Dave Elder-Vass
  • Published online:
    28 July 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022
  • Value is central to the market sectors of the contemporary economy, yet the best-established theories of value fail to expose how it operates and how it is manipulated for profit. This book begins to reconstruct the theory of value. In one sense, it argues, value is a personal assessment of worth, but those assessments draw deeply on normative standards. The book examines those standards and how they are formed, transformed and supported by the construction of new social structures. The empirical evidence comes from contemporary financial examples: the mortgage-backed securities that caused the global crash of 2008, how venture capitalists secure outrageous valuations for so-called unicorn companies, and the rise of Bitcoin. The result is a theory that shows how value is invented by value entrepreneurs in pursuit of their interests and thus provides a new basis for criticising the role of value in the commodity economy and the finance sector.