I had a bizarre conversation a few months ago with an ultra-libertarian (in the American sense). I was talking with him about how Taiwan’s Youbike system is subsidized by the government such that the first 30 minutes of each ride is free, which is enormously useful for the city insomuch as it reduces traffic, reduces emissions, and essentially solves the last-mile problem for the city.
He didn’t like it. He didn’t think it was acceptable that car drivers “had to pay” for bike riders (through taxes). I pointed out that everyone in the city pays for, for example, roads that are only really for car drivers, which is good for us since e.g. delivery trucks use it, or generally speaking, a functional road system enables commerce. He said we could have that with private, pay to use roads. I asked, what about the obvious drawbacks of such a system, such as such a system reinforcing a wealth divide, since poor people won’t be able to afford to use the road as much and are thus restricted from participating in normal life as much? His answer: “I don’t think we should value all people equally.”
I was at first at a loss for words, despite being pretty sure I would reach a point like this with him eventually: usually I can carry a conversation down to the roots of a fundamental personal values incompatibility with someone (there’s that word again!). I managed to figure out that what he meant wasn’t quite as abhorrent as I initially thought. He wasn’t suggesting that some humans have less moral worth than others, rather he meant that he cares more about his family members than some random people at the end of a dirt road. I didn’t get a chance to explore with him what a society looks like when everyone thinks so myopically, or explore with him why he arbitrarily draws the line of caring about either people at family, or perhaps friends - how far? What about your neighbors? Your fellow fans of a given sports team? People who share your hobby, or ideology? People who vote like you do? Why not extend to your neighborhood, city, state, country? Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this, and I think we’ve overloaded the word “Value,” and I think many people take advantage of this fact to engage in rhetorical tricks.
I’m aware of four possible meanings of the word “value” when used to describe “valuing someone:”
- Moral worth: your belief whether a given human has equal standing with other humans by virtue of their being human
- Personal attachment: your emotional connection to someone based on proximity, genetics, or other factors
- Instrumental value: your belief in the utilitarian usefulness of someone; how much profit they can generate, how much labor they can provide, how much they can innovate
- Allocation priority: how much of a scarce resource should be assigned to them, how resources are distributed in a social system
So you may “value” a family member more than a stranger because you have a personal attachment to your family member, but rationally you likely don’t believe they should have a higher allocation priority of societal resources (unless you’re a mega-libertarian).
There’s a final definition for value: monetary worth. I think the conflation of these five concepts has been a useful rhetorical trick for the forces of Capital. “What value do you get out of…” “How much do you value…” “But what’s the value?” The reduction of so many different concepts to a single scalar, the little toy that financial molesters get to play games with to make the number next to their name get bigger while the number next to our name gets smaller. That number, by the way, is our value. Now it’s not just the amount of money we control, it’s our “net worth”; it conveniently represents our moral worth, our instrumental value, and our allocation priority. After all, the vast majority of our societal resources are being directed by the hands of the people with the largest numbers next to their name. They control the majority of resource allocation, serving themselves first.
Reductionist rhetorical tricks. Imagine comparing the utility or allocation priority of a gallon of milk and an hour of a doctor’s labor with a single scalar. Absurd. Totally unsolvable, utterly unreliable. The game is kept alive because it’s evolved memetic viruses that are remarkably persistent: useful lies like “the market allocates efficiently.”
I got annoyed enough about this to kick off a project a few months ago inspired by the resource allocation mechanism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed,” the Production, Distribution, and Coordination software. Similar to projects like Cybersyn, the idea is that two farm towns could indicate a need for phosphorous, without which they will have reduced production. This reduced production would affect down-chain ranches, who will then provide less calories to down-chain consumers like food halls. Calculating the overall caloric consequence of directing all phosphorous to farm A, B, or the split between them, is the goal. Calories aren’t the single scalar, though. The goal is that one could also track the increase or decrease of labor needed to maintain a given farm to achieve a given output of wheat, or calculate how much extra precursor a fabrication plant would need to output enough phosphorous for both farms.
I think it’s absurd to believe that a single scalar, money, could efficiently resolve these equations, just based on human vibes. Pure averaging guesswork, without taking the true needs of people into consideration. Maybe in the future we can stop pretending like our feelings about something or someone, or their usefulness, or their moral worth or allocation priority, can be reduced down to a single scalar or described by a single word.