WHY IS A THEORY OF VALUE SO IMPORTANT?
Henry George was one of the last economists to put forward a coherent theory of value. In the twentieth century, the quest for a proper theory of value seems to have been all but abandoned. Economists have conditioned themselves to doing without any (apparent) theory of value at all. So used have we become to managing without one, it is worth asking: why is a theory of value so important? A theory of value must explain why things (commodities, land, labour, fine art etc) are “valuable”. But, straight away, we must define what we mean by “valuable”. In political economy something is “valuable” according to the price which it will command in a market.[2] To state that something is “valuable” in this sense does not involve any moral, or subjective, opinion or assessment. In stating the value of something we are not prescribing anything, in the way that priests and politicians may do; we are not urging values on people. Rather, we are describing how and why things in fact come to be valued
