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Some Contributions of Economics to the General Theory of Value

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

K. E. Boulding
K. E. Boulding*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

There is a famous character in one of Oscar Wilde's plays who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. An economist wonders uneasily if the reference is not to him. The word “value” occurs in economic writings with high frequency, the frequency of meanings being almost as great as the frequency of occurrence. It has been the occasions of long and bitter disputes, some on the semantic level, some more substantive. What I want to accomplish in this paper is a relatively humble task—to examine some of the concepts and related systems in economics which seem to be relevant to the general problem of value, and to see how far and in what directions they might be safely generalized. I do not claim that economics, even when generalized to the full, gives us a complete theory of value. Many of the most important and most difficult questions in value theory cannot be answered within the framework which I shall set up. But economics can, I hope, provide something of a foundation on which to build, or at least a launching platform from which to send off our philosophical rockets.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , January 1956 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © 1956, The Williams & Wilkins Company

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References

1 “If among a nation of hunters, for instance, it usually costs twice the labor to kill a beaver which it does to kill a deer, one beaver should naturally exchange for or be worth two deer.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter 6, p. 47 (Modern Library).