Confusion of value and price

[mike777]

Of course you dont need to sell something to place a value on something.

 

In fact I do that for a living.

 

"But one often places a value on something by putting a price on it."

 

--

 

 

 

 

I am now reading the new Van Gogh book. The art is breathless and beautiful and (worthless???) when he lived.

 

--

 

 

 

Side note on my last visit to France we went to SEVERAL Van Gogh places....my fellow bus mates are bored out of their minds and said so. I was dizzy from the sadness and beauty.

 

fwiw I have alot of prints on my walls right now.

[barmar]

Are we getting into "tree falls in a forest" territory?

[mike777]

Are we getting into "tree falls in a forest" territory?

 

 

If art can make one cry ......I guess so......

[Fluffy]

addding to this discussion, I have a present from '98 from a bridge tournament in my closet wrapped, I don´t know what it is, but I suspect that what it could be worth is more than what it is actually worth, so I keep it wrapped and its content remains unknown year after year. I have a couple more extra now, but the first one was from '98

[phil_20686]

Of course not. My question goes to the subjective/objective distinction.

 

Granted that humans are "sometimes capable of objectivity if we should put our mind to it." But even if we put our minds to it, how can we say objectively that, for example, a meadow of flowers is more beautiful than a sunset?

 

My question was designed to expose the individualist cant that you put on objectivity. You seem to think that something has objective value if and only if we all agree that it has the same value. This is not a good definition. For example, a share has an objective value, based on the future earnings it entitles you to, however, its uncertain as we do not know the future earnings. All agree that it has a fair value, and we can work it out historically, but the uncertainty surrounding the future means that people will disagree about what it is. The market aggregates this disagreement into a price.

 

A similar thing should happen with beauty - we recognise that it has value not only because we appreciate it, but also because other people have appreciated it and will appreciate it. Of course, there is uncertainty because we do not know with any certainty how many people will appreciate it in the future. This gives us a measure which is objective, but still uncertain. We can apply it to the past and say, the sum of its value up to now is all the appreciation people have had from it up to now, plus some expectation of the amount that people will value it in the future. This is entirely analogous to a share price.

 

Of course, there are many other ways to define beauty, but this seems to nicely straddle objective and subjectivist points in a believable way. Mozart is better than the Beatles because up util this point more people have appreciated Mozart in the 400 years his music has been around than have appreciated the Beatles (probably). At some point in the future this might change, but this is merely the "historic" value. The objective value will be defined when a thing is lost or destroyed so that its value can never be added to.

 

Of course, this viewpoint is not without flaws, as if i create a beautiful painting and then burn it it is basically worthless. Or it might make artificial trees more beautiful than real ones since they last longer. However, these are not unworkable difficulties. Simply use appreciation per view or some such.

 

Of course, one can phrase this in a theist viewpoint - the objectivity of beauty is God's opinion on it. Since we were created to be similar to God in some ways it would make sense that the aggregate of human opinion over a large number of humans in a large number of cultural contexts should be a pretty good approximation of God's opinion.

[phil_20686]

Could you explain why? I am trying to understand what makes you this sure, but I can't. I guess I am closed minded but I like attributes to have a meaning in a certain moment of time, not just integrated over all of time (if you excuse my mathematical language).

 

You sound like a condensed matter physicist. If you were a GR theorist you would only think in world lines. And if you were a quantum theorist you would only think in path integrals. :)

 

By the ergodic theorem summing over time is just the same as summing over an ensemble - i.e. it its equivalent to taking a large numbers of humans from different cultural contexts and measuring them right now. I only didn't use it as a practical matter that we might expect cultures in the future to be much more different than current world cultures are from one another, so the averaging confuses the argument a little I think.

[y66]

Because surely a better definition of the worth of a thing is the sum of all the use/pleasure etc that one gets from it over its entire existence, which is fixed. The price might measure the use I will get from it in some finite time.

 

The sum of a thing's use/pleasure over its entire existence is not the same thing as a thing's present value. In Pulp Fiction, that gold watch was obviously irreplaceable to Butch since he was willing to give up his life to get it back. But I doubt he could have insured it for more than a couple hundred dollars or that it would ever occur to anyone besides him that the value it acquired during those years it was stored away in a coffee can or up his father's ass in prison camp increased it's value in the marketplace to an arm's length buyer. Its patina maybe.

[phil_20686]

The sum of a thing's use/pleasure over its entire existence is not the same thing as a thing's present value price.

[gwnn]

The ergodic principle is cool Phil but I still think a half full beer bottle is worth less than a full beer bottle, even though summing through all their existence (past and future) they provide, in principle, equal pleasure. Am I misunderstanding you still?

[y66]

The sum of a thing's use/pleasure over its entire existence is not the same thing as a thing's present value or its price.

[PassedOut]

My question was designed to expose the individualist cant that you put on objectivity. You seem to think that something has objective value if and only if we all agree that it has the same value. This is not a good definition. For example, a share has an objective value, based on the future earnings it entitles you to, however, its uncertain as we do not know the future earnings. All agree that it has a fair value, and we can work it out historically, but the uncertainty surrounding the future means that people will disagree about what it is. The market aggregates this disagreement into a price.

 

A similar thing should happen with beauty - we recognise that it has value not only because we appreciate it, but also because other people have appreciated it and will appreciate it. Of course, there is uncertainty because we do not know with any certainty how many people will appreciate it in the future. This gives us a measure which is objective, but still uncertain. We can apply it to the past and say, the sum of its value up to now is all the appreciation people have had from it up to now, plus some expectation of the amount that people will value it in the future.

No, I am saying that -- unlike money, distance, or time -- there is no way to measure the amount of appreciation felt for works of art or the beauties of nature. So, no matter how hard we put our minds to it, we can never objectively determine what you describe as "the sum of its value up to now is all the appreciation people have had from it."

 

But even if that sort of valuation made sense, you'd only be measuring the reactions of people to a thing, not the properties of the thing itself.

[phil_20686]

The ergodic principle is cool Phil but I still think a half full beer bottle is worth less than a full beer bottle, even though summing through all their existence (past and future) they provide, in principle, equal pleasure. Am I misunderstanding you still?

 

I think we understand each other. This example simply asserts that "value" should be future orientated - the fact that you only have half a beer still to drink, compared to a full beer, is what is important. That is certainly what the price would measure if you tried to sell it. But that means you are assigning no value to your past experience. A point of view which seems oddly blinkered. It seems to me that a full account of worth should take account of what has happened, what is happening, and what will/might happen.

 

EDIT: try attempting to apply this attitude to people: Is an old man "worth" less because he has fewer days to live (probably) than a young man? This seems analogous to your beer example. Compare this to valuations of a fetus - which are often historic, in the sense that it is deemed to be `less than a human adult' because it has not achieved consciousness yet. Empiricists often embrace Presentism implicitly, which is the belief, essentially, that neither the past nor the future are "real" but only what is happening exactly now. This seems like an untenable position for a physicist.

[phil_20686]

No, I am saying that -- unlike money, distance, or time -- there is no way to measure the amount of appreciation felt for works of art or the beauties of nature. So, no matter how hard we put our minds to it, we can never objectively determine what you describe as "the sum of its value up to now is all the appreciation people have had from it."

 

But even if that sort of valuation made sense, you'd only be measuring the reactions of people to a thing, not the properties of the thing itself.

 

This sort of valuation does make sense. Appreciation of beauty exists, it is technically difficult, maybe impossible, to measure it, but that does not negate that it is a thing which could in principle be measured. It is implicit in our daily lives that this is so, we say x is more beautiful than y, if measurement was impossible this would be a content free statement.

 

The inability to assign a number to something is not a weakness.

 

Your second point opens a messy can of worms, but let me attempt to bypass it by saying - all measurements are measurements of the reactions of people to a thing, not the thing itself. This is because all measurements are made at some point by the interface of consciousness on the material world through your body. I stress that this does not mean necessarily that one cannot obtain objective information about the material world, but it does indicated that there are situations where the properties of a thing are indistinguishable from the reactions of people to that thing.

[phil_20686]

The sum of a thing's use/pleasure over its entire existence is not the same thing as a thing's present value or its price.

 

An assertion is not an argument.

[PassedOut]

This sort of valuation does make sense. Appreciation of beauty exists, it is technically difficult, maybe impossible, to measure it, but that does not negate that it is a thing which could in principle be measured. It is implicit in our daily lives that this is so, we say x is more beautiful than y, if measurement was impossible this would be a content free statement.

 

The inability to assign a number to something is not a weakness.

 

Your second point opens a messy can of worms, but let me attempt to bypass it by saying - all measurements are measurements of the reactions of people to a thing, not the thing itself. This is because all measurements are made at some point by the interface of consciousness on the material world through your body. I stress that this does not mean necessarily that one cannot obtain objective information about the material world, but it does indicated that there are situations where the properties of a thing are indistinguishable from the reactions of people to that thing.

The inability to assign a number to something is not a weakness.

It is if you need to calculate a sum.

 

...we say x is more beautiful than y, if measurement was impossible this would be a content free statement.

Only if one considers subjective statements to be content free. I do not.

 

...all measurements are measurements of the reactions of people to a thing, not the thing itself.

Here you are shifting to a second order. In context, your statement applies to measurements of people's reactions to the thing, not to measurements of the thing itself.

[phil_20686]

It is if you need to calculate a sum.

 

But we don't need to know the value of the sum, only to agree that such a sum exists. If a thing has objective value is not the same as question as what that question is. This is akin to the concept of the "non-constructive proof".

 

Only if one considers subjective statements to be content free. I do not.

 

This isnt an objective/subjective distinction. All comparative statements imply the existence of a ranking. Once you have a ranking you have a method of valuation.

 

Here you are shifting to a second order. In context, your statement applies to measurements of people's reactions to the thing, not to measurements of the thing itself.

No - merely pointing out the foundations of epistemology - how do you know the information of your sense is objective: you dont, and you cant prove it, you can only assume it.

[gwnn]

I still don't understand why you're so sure about this.

 

"Because surely a better definition of the worth of a thing is the sum of all the use/pleasure etc that one gets from it over its entire existence, which is fixed"

 

In your words, an assertion is not an argument. The only argument I think I read was about comparing the worth of an old man with the worth of a young man. I don't know what it means that one person is worth more than another and I don't want to know, honestly. I don't think there's a good way to measure people's worth.

 

Anyway, even if I agree to your idea of taking past use as well as future use, there's a huge problem with your idea that this cumulative value is constant in time. If you were a quantum physicist, you would known that the world is not deterministic so it is impossible to predict (even in principle, not just practical) the future. And the best guess for the future changes as we go along in time. I suppose you could say that you can only tell something's worth once it has ceased to exist, but surely you agree that nobody in the world feels like that (except sighing "absence makes the heart go fonder").

[PassedOut]

But we don't need to know the value of the sum, only to agree that such a sum exists.

And we can agree that without numbers, no sum can be determined.

 

This isnt an objective/subjective distinction. All comparative statements imply the existence of a ranking.

But not an objective ranking.

 

No - merely pointing out the foundations of epistemology - how do you know the information of your sense is objective: you dont, and you can't prove it, you can only assume it.

That does not address my objection. When you are measuring appreciation of beauty, you are measuring the reactions of people, not the thing that people are appreciating. Of course you are using your senses to do the measuring; that is not the issue. The issue is that you are measuring the wrong thing.

 

If something has beauty, it has it independent of the number of people who happen to become aware of it. So you can't determine "objective" beauty by measuring reactions (although you can learn something about people).

[hotShot]

Don't we see the same kind of confusion about value and price at the stock market?

[helene_t]

I don't see anything wrong with defining "value"/"worth" as "market value", as long as the one I am talking to is aware that that is the definition, and as long as "market value" is relevant to the issue we are discussing. More generally, I can't be that exited about semantic issues. I appreciate accurate communication, but accuracy in communication is an entirely subjective thing. If Alice says something to Bob, what matters is that Bob interprets the message the way Alice meant it. Whether the words Alice uses would mean something else to a third party (or mean something else according to some canonical dictionary) doesn't matter.

 

As for the OP, the amount that was quoted might technically be the amount the painting was insured for, rather than an unbiased estimate of the market value. Maybe no better estimate of the market value was available, and insurance price may then be seen as a reasonably proxy. I have no idea how accurate it is in this case but in general I woulad expect insurance companies to refuse to insure items for much more than the market price.

 

Anyway, I think it should be obvious that the text meant to address the market value, as opposed to some subjective measure of "utility" or whatever.

 

FWIW I would say that most "value" concepts are subjective. I can't understand what "objective beauty" might mean - to me, beauty is inherently subjective. But I suppose it could depend on how you use the word "subjective" in this particular context.

 

As for the value of stock market assets, I would say that they are subjective in the sense that if one investor thinks that a particular asset is a good buy while another investor thinks it isn't, then it is not necessarily so that one of them must be wrong because the asset has an objective value which they would both agree on if they had full information. It is entirely plausible that an asset can have different value to different people. Of course this is more obvious when it comes to non-financial assets like chocolate icecream (which some people like and others don't) and even more obvious when it comes to immaterial things like friendship. But even for stock market assets there is some subjectivity at play.

 

As for persistence of value, I have to agree with Csaba. While "value" or "worth" can have many meanings dependent on context, I don't think I can imagine a single such concept which would necessarily be constant in time. It is not just trivial examples like fresh fruit and vegetables being worth more when the weather is warm, or commodities being worth more when substitutes are scarce. It is also that my appreciation of things change over time as I grow. Sex wasn't valuable before puberty. Good food wasn't valuable when I had anorexia. The relative importance of personal safety, intelectual challenges, professional pride, the feeling of important to dear ones, the feeling of being useful to sosciety etc. have changed during my life.

[luke warm]

No - merely pointing out the foundations of epistemology - how do you know the information of your sense is objective: you dont, and you cant prove it, you can only assume it.

does objectivity even enter into epistemology?

[phil_20686]

does objectivity even enter into epistemology?

 

This is a classic question. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, oddly, the question of whether you can have objective knowledge about a thing falls under the purview of epistemology.

[phil_20686]

I still don't understand why you're so sure about this.

 

"Because surely a better definition of the worth of a thing is the sum of all the use/pleasure etc that one gets from it over its entire existence, which is fixed"

 

In your words, an assertion is not an argument. The only argument I think I read was about comparing the worth of an old man with the worth of a young man. I don't know what it means that one person is worth more than another and I don't want to know, honestly. I don't think there's a good way to measure people's worth.

 

Anyway, even if I agree to your idea of taking past use as well as future use, there's a huge problem with your idea that this cumulative value is constant in time. If you were a quantum physicist, you would known that the world is not deterministic so it is impossible to predict (even in principle, not just practical) the future. And the best guess for the future changes as we go along in time. I suppose you could say that you can only tell something's worth once it has ceased to exist, but surely you agree that nobody in the world feels like that (except sighing "absence makes the heart go fonder").

 

Amusingly, I am a quantum physicist, at least some of the time. :)

 

I thought I addressed this point with the share price example. "Fair value" for a share is a well established concept when applied historically. Basically it amounts to spreading the capital around so that return on investment is equal in every share. When applied to current prices it amounts to making bets about the future. It is still, in some sense, an objective measure, as I have an algorithm that computes it from the data, however there is uncertainty because I do not have any data about the future. For it to be a useful concept I do not have to have the ability to compute it now, if I can compute it for historical objects I can see that I can apply it to the future, only now I would have an expectation of some confidence. As the future becomes the past I know if my expectation was right or wrong. Thus we can only determine its objective value historically, but we can agree that there is an objective valuation, we just don't know what it is for the future.

 

The question of how to value things is very important. I would argue for a balanced approach, that the worth of something is based on its history, its current situation, and its future. The fact that we cannot measure the future should not mean that we treat it as less important than a things history.

[phil_20686]

And we can agree that without numbers, no sum can be determined.

 

 

But not an objective ranking.

 

 

That does not address my objection. When you are measuring appreciation of beauty, you are measuring the reactions of people, not the thing that people are appreciating. Of course you are using your senses to do the measuring; that is not the issue. The issue is that you are measuring the wrong thing.

 

If something has beauty, it has it independent of the number of people who happen to become aware of it. So you can't determine "objective" beauty by measuring reactions (although you can learn something about people).

 

But beauty is basically, "does object A conform to abstract standard B" - which is a process only humans can do. The argument about whether beauty is "objective" is the argument about whether the abstract standard is similar for all humans, whether it is a pure cultural construction, or whether it is some mixture of the above. Its exactly the argument about objective morality in essence, so we are argument about the standard against which to measure the object, beauty is never, properly understood, a property of the object itself. Of course, this is a fine distinction that is not particularly useful in essence.

[gwnn]

No, it doesn't mean that we treat it as less important, it's just that our best guess for future will change as we go forward in time. Just a simple example, my umbrella will have more or less worth as the weather forecast changes. Today is Wednesday, but the forecast for next week will be different today than it is tomorrow. So my umbrella's worth will change from today to tomorrow (its total use or expected total use change from day to day). The only time we could even in principle know its worth is once I disposed of it.

 

edit: by the way, I was a condensed matter physicist in my masters, nice catch