Raw materials and basic services need to be valued more, manufacturing skill needs to be valued more and, oddly, “things” need to be valued more.
You don’t get to determine what value is nor what is valued nor how.
We’ve got this market thing you see? Which, at root, is simply all of us, all 7 billion of us, placing upon what other people produce the value that we think it has. Each of us individually exercises our judgement, measures the additional utility that a good or service brings us and the market aggregates those into a system of prices: the values.
And that’s it I’m afraid. There is no great secret.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Surreptitious Evil // Jul 28, 2012 at 9:22 am
And some people have, in other people’s eyes, terrible judgement.
And some people are willing to pay decent money for image. Hell, some people are willing to pay decent money for junk.
It’s nobody’s business but their own.
Still, rich socialists always know better than us peons.
2 MyBurningEars // Jul 28, 2012 at 10:22 am
Does she understand what she is saying? ‘When faced by their budget constraint, consumers should only be able to afford fewer manufactured things.’ That’s what it boils down to isn’t?
3 Tim Newman // Jul 28, 2012 at 10:54 am
I’m with her insofar as I think engineering services should be valued more. Project engineers, for example those employed in the oil business, should be provided with yacht allowances by the government.
4 Andrew M // Jul 28, 2012 at 11:56 am
“How much more lucrative it is to … work in the media. … Yet the people who clean up our dirty, filthy world are the lowest of the low, especially when it comes to pay and conditions.”
Ok Debbie, why don’t you swap salaries with your cleaner for three months and see how you like it? At least Polly made some effort (c.f. her book “Hard Work”).
5 Nautical Nick // Jul 28, 2012 at 3:04 pm
So we should all become greedy materialists, now, should we?
6 Gene Berman // Jul 29, 2012 at 3:29 pm
I’m with Tim Newman, with the sole exception that I think the very highest recompense should be reserved for older guys who don’t do much except read blogs all day long. Project engineers employed in the oil business right next in line., of course.
7 David Gillies // Jul 30, 2012 at 7:24 pm
Clearly software engineers are grotesquely underpaid and should be compensated with buckets of cash plus hot and cold running nymphettes.
Orr’s article seems to contain a good dollop of that nonsense about workers being able to afford the products they create. It was crap when people said it about Henry Ford, and it’s crap now.
Leave a Comment