If infant mortality was higher that’d be terrible, but I assume people would have more kids to compensate. Automobiles other than trucks don’t help much; they enable rural settlements, but not many live there and they are disproportionally expensive. I bet they’d be a lot less populated w/o all the subsidy. Cars also may not last long with a carbon tax. And cars actively harm cities substantially.
Professionals in these fields don’t know some of these either. And why should everyone else? I’d go the other way: Untangle policy from the masses.
You don’t seem to understand how rural life works and why it’s important. You also seem to think that small town lives and rural lives are more expensive than city lives. Please, allow me to clear up some misunderstandings.
Small towns aren’t places that manufacture food for cities. They’re places where people live and thrive, where occasionally you’ll see families that farm or raise animals for a job. You seem to think that all the rural area in the world can just be replaced by corporations that send out farmers to live more “efficiently”. This doesn’t make sense because you can’t just make a farmer. You have to be raised on a farm, to understand the difficulties and enjoy them because they’re your way of life. You don’t see city folk moving out to the country to farm. Ever. You couldn’t pay them enough.
They’ve tried to do corporate farming, by the way. It doesn’t work. This is because in corporations, people get lazy. They figure out how to take advantage of the system and work as little as possible to get the money they need to live. You need to keep people paid, even when their job isn’t currently relevant. It isn’t the same with family farms.
Farmers work lots of jobs. That means planting, spraying, repairing machinery, harvesting, building things, and so much more. Everything is pretty much DIY because it costs too much to get others to do things. That’s why everything is always jerry-rigged and sketchy as heck. It’s cheap.
From the rural perspective, the city is the wasteful place. It just seems like a black hole of resource use and pollution creation, and for what? I read somewhere that it costs two million dollars to build a public bathroom in New York City. That is absolutely ridiculous. It should cost a hundredth of that, max.
I think you make a lot of assumptions of what I believe here.
Large family owned farms constitute about half of total farm area. It’s not really clear to me what qualifies as “family owned” here: I imagine most still have a number of workers.
I’m also not sure if farms are the primary driver of rural economies. They certainly occupy most of the area. Rural areas appear to take the form of vast swaths of nothing but farms surrounding tiny suburb-density towns. I think there’s a good chance that without the subsidy and with more direct infrastructure burden, the tiny towns (which seem to be most of the rural population) would significantly shrink in population.
That said, I admit (electric? micro?) cars or motorcycles seem like a perfectly reasonable transport system for the remaining rural population. Farmers might need higher clearance for field roads. PRT would likely work for small towns and inter-town transport, but not for farms, and wouldn’t have been possible until recently. If highways are much cheaper with smaller vehicles and without trucks, I imagine rail would be a good alternative for farmers to ship produce.
The main point I was making is that rural areas have significantly more road, utility cost, and transport cost per capita. Owning a car is expensive, and unnecessary in many cities.
You’re not wrong that NYC is a bit insane (and I don’t think “a hundredth” is out of the question in many cities), but the added value seems to generally outweigh the increased waste of most cities even today. Pollution can be mitigated with incentives, and I’d be surprised if rural areas don’t pollute more per capita.
Jerry-rigging everything is a compromise you don’t need to make in many cities! I’d argue that that sort of thing is just a market inefficiency, and actually more wasteful. If you wouldn’t jerry-rig in a city, it’s probably because paying someone is actually a better deal overall, ignoring regulations.
Interesting, I appreciate you taking the time to formulate a coherent and respectful response, and I’ll do my best to do the same.
Rural Economy
Farmers raise corn and soybeans. Beans mainly go to feed livestock. Corn is split between livestock and making ethanol. Ethanol is sold to fuel cars. So, our main exports are soybeans, meat, and ethanol.
A lot of people have jobs supporting the local population or for local companies. The rest either drive 45 minutes to the nearest city or work at the door factory that’s in a nearby town.
We all call it the city, but I guess it’s not that big by your standards. Sioux City has 82,000 people. It feels huge to us.
Cars
People in small towns are generally more poor than people in cities (I think, I have no experience with cities), and what people drive is generally what they can afford. I think you’d have a tough time convincing all of the mothers that their minivans can all be replaced with motorcycles and sleek electric vehicles. (also, you need significant clearance for gravel roads)
As for replacing semi trucks with trains, I’m sorry, but that could never work. I’ll explain why, don’t worry. Here’s how corn and beans are moved, at least at my parents’ farm.
First, when the crops are harvested, they’re placed in the bed of a semi truck to be hauled to wherever there’s storage. For my farm, that’s my grandparents’ place where there’s a pair of elevators for the drying process (complicated) and a few dozen grain bins which range in size from 16 to 80 thousand bushels.
Then, when the market is at its highest, the grain is sold to a coop (a kind of company that buys up grain from farmers and sells it all to someone who can’t afford to deal with small-time farmers) or ethanol plant or whatever. Someone will drive that grain to its destination in a semi truck.
A train system that accommodates these two steps would have to connect thousands of farms to hundreds of farm houses to dozens of processing plants. It would have to conform to hundreds of different farming styles. Basically, the concept is inconceivable. The system already in place allows anyone to haul grain anywhere anytime they like, relatively cheaply. Trains only really get efficient when you’re travelling a very long distance, and for most areas, that just isn’t the case.
Pollution
Nobody notices pollution or smog in small towns.
I’ve visited NYC once, and it was awful. It’s never like that in rural areas.
So, you’ll have a really tough time convincing anyone to use green vehicles. There’s really no incentive. In fact, a rather successful local business takes modern vehicles and removes all of the emission control bits. It makes the car or truck more fuel efficient and more powerful/responsive.
Subsidies
People keep talking about subsidies. I don’t think they understand exactly how things work. There are three ways my parents might get money from taxpayers.
We get money for maintaining the terraces on the farms. This is part of a big program to prevent runoff, and it’s necessary to keep farms productive.
Sometimes, a farm is converted to natural prairie to support wildlife and butterflies and such. This is called CRP, and you can get a little money for it, but not much.
When the markets are bad and there’s no way to make money, we’ll get money. Otherwise, you’d suddenly see half of the farmers go out of business and then you’d have no food. This happened especially when the Trump trade deal with China didn’t go through, so a lot of the soybean export just stopped happening.
The taxes my parents pay (about half of what they make) is MUCH higher than what they’re payed. Farm expenses are tax deductible, but everything else isn’t. If my dad makes 500,000 dollars, spends 80% on that on the next year’s seed, fertilizer, equipment repairs, and all other expenses, whatever is left over is cut in half. The system is basically made to make sure farmers can’t get ahead. Please, stop pretending that farmers are just accepting cash from the government, because most of the time, they work harder than anyone with significant risk.
That got way longer than I meant it to. I hope you get a picture of what life is like in the country. If you’d like to provide city perspective, I have no idea what people actually do for work there (big buildings full of offices? All I know is what’s in movies.)
Re 2.2, a historical note: We had trains long before we had trucks, and people solved the last-mile problem with horses. Trains didn’t decrease horse usage because they were actually complements, not substitutes. Dependence on horses only decreases with the motor vehicle.
Thanks again for the perspective! These are good things to note and provide a lot of context. I still wonder what qualifies as “family owned” and whether it’s really just farming that brings 60 million to rural life.
The median household income in rural America looks to be only a bit lower than urban. Otoh, the rural poverty rate was 16.4 percent in 2017, compared with 12.9 percent for urban areas.
Jason Crawford mentions farms worked with trains and horses before trucks. The scenario I mentioned with trains would still use (intermodal?) trucks for the last mile and just replace rural highways. I could believe farming transport demands are too strange for this, but I could also see standardization insignificantly increasing costs. And do people in town often travel to the farms or mostly just to other towns or cities?
Pollution isn’t just a local issue, and I agree rural areas have no obvious pollution—but a carbon tax (for global warming) would make fuel more expensive, increasing the already significant costs of rural gas transportation.
I imagine the biggest subsidy of rural areas is the highways, which are 3⁄4 of the paved lane-miles in the US. The maintenance of these highways appear to amount to ~$3600 per capita annually, with a subsidy of ~$1200. I’d believe that utilities aren’t subsidized more than their urban counterparts.
If as this implies there really isn’t much subsidy, I stand corrected! Thank you, cars. And of course, any other technology (electric, PRT) would still function like the automobile. And AC / climate control is necessary in many states.
Now I wonder how rural areas look in other countries wrt population share, infrastructure, economy, and farm finances.
No, just that the following doesn’t make sense if people have more kids as a result:
half of everyone you know over the age of five is alive today only because of antibiotics, vaccines, and sanitizing chemicals in our water supply
I suppose this is fuzzy, but you could also argue no one you know would be alive in such a counterfactual because all their genes and experiences would be different as well.
This is pretty much pedantry, but you could’ve phrased it just as “there’s been a huge reduction in childhood death”.
I agree it’s a bit more nuanced than it seems at face value—my alternate universe self would likely have different friends because some of my friends would have died in childhood, and this wouldn’t matter so much to my alternate self. But to my current self, it’s a super big deal if half of the people I currently care about would have died young! And I think that’s the point Jason is making.
He’s being pedantic, but has an important underlying point—it’s not clear what comparison is being made in terms of terminal value for these advances (note: I prefer the current world, but I think that’s because I’m focusing on the lucky existing humans, rather than the never-conceived).
Human mortality is still 100% overall, and it’s not made clear exactly WHY it’s better to have a smaller population of under-5 children (comparing the world where 2 children are created per couple, and most live to adulthood, vs 6 being conceived, 2 lost before or during birth and 2 lost before age 5).
Don’t you think it matters to the parents? And, for that matter, to the older siblings? To the child’s friends—if they live long enough to make friends?
Do you actually think an infant or young child is just… replaceable?
While I agree with you that reducing child mortality is one of the big wins of progress, I have a sense that you’re reasoning about it the wrong way?
Like, I think many (most? Nearly all?) people in the long past did have the view that infants or young children are replaceable, because it was adaptive to their circumstances, and their culture promoted adaptive responses to those circumstances. [Practices like not naming a child for a year are a strategy for the parents to not get too attached, and that makes more sense the less likely it is that a child will last a year.] If they saw the level of attachment our culture encourages parents to have to their infants, they would (rightly!) see it as profligate spending only made possible by our massive wealth and technological know-how.
And so in my view, the largest component of the benefit from being in a low infant-mortality world is that parents can afford to treat their children as irreplaceable, which is better for everyone involved. [Like, in the world that’s distant to ameliorate the likely pain of child mortality, also the people who survive have their early experience of the world characterized by distance and low parental investment, including nutritional investment.] The longer you expect things to last, the more you can invest in them—and that goes for relationships and friendships as well.
Do you actually think an infant or young child is just… replaceable?
Not directly, for any given child. But I think potential children are at least partially fungible. Whether it’s better to have 3 children who live for decades, or 6 children, three of which only live a few years and 3 who live for decades is a very hard question.
I don’t know how to value a short life, compared to no life at all. I do think it’s an irrelevant distraction (in this context) to compare one short life to a different individual’s long life.
Not the OP, but I do think that an infant is not worth much except their sentimental value to their family. A nitpick: “replaceability” is rather different from “worthlessness.” Humans are obviously pretty replaceable, as evidenced by us all being replaced in around half a century. The question that is interesting to ask is, how much does a society improve (economically?) when its childhood mortality falls?
I do think that an infant is not worth much except their sentimental value to their family.
All meaning is in our heads. That doesn’t make that meaning any less real. If someone places a lot of meaning on their infant dying, then the infant had a lot of value. If you want to put a dollar value on it, then you can ask the family how much they would pay to bring their child back to life. I would expect most people would pay a lot.
True, but the value is to them. (And what they pay to save the infant has a major signaling component. From what I see of my grandparents who lived in a much more traditional era (Iran’s modernization is more recent.), they did not value young children that much, and recognized the reality that they could just have another child relatively cheaply.) That value will be discounted heavily in my utility function, as it does not contribute either directly to me or to the core needs of my society. (Kind of reminds me of Malthusianism; Humanity right now could probably live a lot less bullshitty if it had controlled its population more intelligently.)
Yes, and not just in this case. Value is always to some individual: There is no value outside of someone’s brain. When we say “value to society”, that’s shorthand for “the aggregation of the value inside every individual’s head”.
Money measures some of the value inside people’s heads: You pay $20 for a shirt, and I can tell that you value the shirt by at least $20. When I go for a walk, I’m not paying anyone, but that doesn’t mean the value is $0.
If infant mortality was higher that’d be terrible, but I assume people would have more kids to compensate. Automobiles other than trucks don’t help much; they enable rural settlements, but not many live there and they are disproportionally expensive. I bet they’d be a lot less populated w/o all the subsidy. Cars also may not last long with a carbon tax. And cars actively harm cities substantially.
Professionals in these fields don’t know some of these either. And why should everyone else? I’d go the other way: Untangle policy from the masses.
You don’t seem to understand how rural life works and why it’s important. You also seem to think that small town lives and rural lives are more expensive than city lives. Please, allow me to clear up some misunderstandings.
Small towns aren’t places that manufacture food for cities. They’re places where people live and thrive, where occasionally you’ll see families that farm or raise animals for a job. You seem to think that all the rural area in the world can just be replaced by corporations that send out farmers to live more “efficiently”. This doesn’t make sense because you can’t just make a farmer. You have to be raised on a farm, to understand the difficulties and enjoy them because they’re your way of life. You don’t see city folk moving out to the country to farm. Ever. You couldn’t pay them enough.
They’ve tried to do corporate farming, by the way. It doesn’t work. This is because in corporations, people get lazy. They figure out how to take advantage of the system and work as little as possible to get the money they need to live. You need to keep people paid, even when their job isn’t currently relevant. It isn’t the same with family farms.
Farmers work lots of jobs. That means planting, spraying, repairing machinery, harvesting, building things, and so much more. Everything is pretty much DIY because it costs too much to get others to do things. That’s why everything is always jerry-rigged and sketchy as heck. It’s cheap.
From the rural perspective, the city is the wasteful place. It just seems like a black hole of resource use and pollution creation, and for what? I read somewhere that it costs two million dollars to build a public bathroom in New York City. That is absolutely ridiculous. It should cost a hundredth of that, max.
This is clarifying of rural life. Thank you!
I think you make a lot of assumptions of what I believe here.
Large family owned farms constitute about half of total farm area. It’s not really clear to me what qualifies as “family owned” here: I imagine most still have a number of workers.
I’m also not sure if farms are the primary driver of rural economies. They certainly occupy most of the area. Rural areas appear to take the form of vast swaths of nothing but farms surrounding tiny suburb-density towns. I think there’s a good chance that without the subsidy and with more direct infrastructure burden, the tiny towns (which seem to be most of the rural population) would significantly shrink in population.
That said, I admit (electric? micro?) cars or motorcycles seem like a perfectly reasonable transport system for the remaining rural population. Farmers might need higher clearance for field roads. PRT would likely work for small towns and inter-town transport, but not for farms, and wouldn’t have been possible until recently. If highways are much cheaper with smaller vehicles and without trucks, I imagine rail would be a good alternative for farmers to ship produce.
The main point I was making is that rural areas have significantly more road, utility cost, and transport cost per capita. Owning a car is expensive, and unnecessary in many cities.
You’re not wrong that NYC is a bit insane (and I don’t think “a hundredth” is out of the question in many cities), but the added value seems to generally outweigh the increased waste of most cities even today. Pollution can be mitigated with incentives, and I’d be surprised if rural areas don’t pollute more per capita.
Jerry-rigging everything is a compromise you don’t need to make in many cities! I’d argue that that sort of thing is just a market inefficiency, and actually more wasteful. If you wouldn’t jerry-rig in a city, it’s probably because paying someone is actually a better deal overall, ignoring regulations.
Interesting, I appreciate you taking the time to formulate a coherent and respectful response, and I’ll do my best to do the same.
Rural Economy
Farmers raise corn and soybeans. Beans mainly go to feed livestock. Corn is split between livestock and making ethanol. Ethanol is sold to fuel cars. So, our main exports are soybeans, meat, and ethanol.
A lot of people have jobs supporting the local population or for local companies. The rest either drive 45 minutes to the nearest city or work at the door factory that’s in a nearby town.
We all call it the city, but I guess it’s not that big by your standards. Sioux City has 82,000 people. It feels huge to us.
Cars
People in small towns are generally more poor than people in cities (I think, I have no experience with cities), and what people drive is generally what they can afford. I think you’d have a tough time convincing all of the mothers that their minivans can all be replaced with motorcycles and sleek electric vehicles. (also, you need significant clearance for gravel roads)
As for replacing semi trucks with trains, I’m sorry, but that could never work. I’ll explain why, don’t worry. Here’s how corn and beans are moved, at least at my parents’ farm.
First, when the crops are harvested, they’re placed in the bed of a semi truck to be hauled to wherever there’s storage. For my farm, that’s my grandparents’ place where there’s a pair of elevators for the drying process (complicated) and a few dozen grain bins which range in size from 16 to 80 thousand bushels.
Then, when the market is at its highest, the grain is sold to a coop (a kind of company that buys up grain from farmers and sells it all to someone who can’t afford to deal with small-time farmers) or ethanol plant or whatever. Someone will drive that grain to its destination in a semi truck.
A train system that accommodates these two steps would have to connect thousands of farms to hundreds of farm houses to dozens of processing plants. It would have to conform to hundreds of different farming styles. Basically, the concept is inconceivable. The system already in place allows anyone to haul grain anywhere anytime they like, relatively cheaply. Trains only really get efficient when you’re travelling a very long distance, and for most areas, that just isn’t the case.
Pollution
Nobody notices pollution or smog in small towns.
I’ve visited NYC once, and it was awful. It’s never like that in rural areas.
So, you’ll have a really tough time convincing anyone to use green vehicles. There’s really no incentive. In fact, a rather successful local business takes modern vehicles and removes all of the emission control bits. It makes the car or truck more fuel efficient and more powerful/responsive.
Subsidies
People keep talking about subsidies. I don’t think they understand exactly how things work. There are three ways my parents might get money from taxpayers.
We get money for maintaining the terraces on the farms. This is part of a big program to prevent runoff, and it’s necessary to keep farms productive.
Sometimes, a farm is converted to natural prairie to support wildlife and butterflies and such. This is called CRP, and you can get a little money for it, but not much.
When the markets are bad and there’s no way to make money, we’ll get money. Otherwise, you’d suddenly see half of the farmers go out of business and then you’d have no food. This happened especially when the Trump trade deal with China didn’t go through, so a lot of the soybean export just stopped happening.
The taxes my parents pay (about half of what they make) is MUCH higher than what they’re payed. Farm expenses are tax deductible, but everything else isn’t. If my dad makes 500,000 dollars, spends 80% on that on the next year’s seed, fertilizer, equipment repairs, and all other expenses, whatever is left over is cut in half. The system is basically made to make sure farmers can’t get ahead. Please, stop pretending that farmers are just accepting cash from the government, because most of the time, they work harder than anyone with significant risk.
That got way longer than I meant it to. I hope you get a picture of what life is like in the country. If you’d like to provide city perspective, I have no idea what people actually do for work there (big buildings full of offices? All I know is what’s in movies.)
Re 2.2, a historical note: We had trains long before we had trucks, and people solved the last-mile problem with horses. Trains didn’t decrease horse usage because they were actually complements, not substitutes. Dependence on horses only decreases with the motor vehicle.
(I just want to say, your comments have been very interesting and detailed in an area I don’t know a lot about, thank you very much for writing them!)
Thanks again for the perspective! These are good things to note and provide a lot of context. I still wonder what qualifies as “family owned” and whether it’s really just farming that brings 60 million to rural life.
The median household income in rural America looks to be only a bit lower than urban. Otoh, the rural poverty rate was 16.4 percent in 2017, compared with 12.9 percent for urban areas.
Jason Crawford mentions farms worked with trains and horses before trucks. The scenario I mentioned with trains would still use (intermodal?) trucks for the last mile and just replace rural highways. I could believe farming transport demands are too strange for this, but I could also see standardization insignificantly increasing costs. And do people in town often travel to the farms or mostly just to other towns or cities?
Pollution isn’t just a local issue, and I agree rural areas have no obvious pollution—but a carbon tax (for global warming) would make fuel more expensive, increasing the already significant costs of rural gas transportation.
I imagine the biggest subsidy of rural areas is the highways, which are 3⁄4 of the paved lane-miles in the US. The maintenance of these highways appear to amount to ~$3600 per capita annually, with a subsidy of ~$1200. I’d believe that utilities aren’t subsidized more than their urban counterparts.
If as this implies there really isn’t much subsidy, I stand corrected! Thank you, cars. And of course, any other technology (electric, PRT) would still function like the automobile. And AC / climate control is necessary in many states.
Now I wonder how rural areas look in other countries wrt population share, infrastructure, economy, and farm finances.
Are you saying it’s morally acceptable for children to die, as long as people have more children to replace them?
No, just that the following doesn’t make sense if people have more kids as a result:
I suppose this is fuzzy, but you could also argue no one you know would be alive in such a counterfactual because all their genes and experiences would be different as well.
This is pretty much pedantry, but you could’ve phrased it just as “there’s been a huge reduction in childhood death”.
I agree it’s a bit more nuanced than it seems at face value—my alternate universe self would likely have different friends because some of my friends would have died in childhood, and this wouldn’t matter so much to my alternate self. But to my current self, it’s a super big deal if half of the people I currently care about would have died young! And I think that’s the point Jason is making.
The point I was making is just that child mortality (before age 5) used to be ~50%. Edward is admittedly being pedantic.
He’s being pedantic, but has an important underlying point—it’s not clear what comparison is being made in terms of terminal value for these advances (note: I prefer the current world, but I think that’s because I’m focusing on the lucky existing humans, rather than the never-conceived).
Human mortality is still 100% overall, and it’s not made clear exactly WHY it’s better to have a smaller population of under-5 children (comparing the world where 2 children are created per couple, and most live to adulthood, vs 6 being conceived, 2 lost before or during birth and 2 lost before age 5).
That’s really not clear to you?
Don’t you think it matters to the parents? And, for that matter, to the older siblings? To the child’s friends—if they live long enough to make friends?
Do you actually think an infant or young child is just… replaceable?
While I agree with you that reducing child mortality is one of the big wins of progress, I have a sense that you’re reasoning about it the wrong way?
Like, I think many (most? Nearly all?) people in the long past did have the view that infants or young children are replaceable, because it was adaptive to their circumstances, and their culture promoted adaptive responses to those circumstances. [Practices like not naming a child for a year are a strategy for the parents to not get too attached, and that makes more sense the less likely it is that a child will last a year.] If they saw the level of attachment our culture encourages parents to have to their infants, they would (rightly!) see it as profligate spending only made possible by our massive wealth and technological know-how.
And so in my view, the largest component of the benefit from being in a low infant-mortality world is that parents can afford to treat their children as irreplaceable, which is better for everyone involved. [Like, in the world that’s distant to ameliorate the likely pain of child mortality, also the people who survive have their early experience of the world characterized by distance and low parental investment, including nutritional investment.] The longer you expect things to last, the more you can invest in them—and that goes for relationships and friendships as well.
Not directly, for any given child. But I think potential children are at least partially fungible. Whether it’s better to have 3 children who live for decades, or 6 children, three of which only live a few years and 3 who live for decades is a very hard question.
I don’t know how to value a short life, compared to no life at all. I do think it’s an irrelevant distraction (in this context) to compare one short life to a different individual’s long life.
Losing a child is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, in terms of long-term well-being. See, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827319302204, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2910450/, and https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-015-9624-x
Yes, in the modern world, where babies are seen as precious, that is true. It clearly wasn’t as big a deal when infant mortality was very high.
The fact that we now see babies as precious is not an arbitrary feature of the modern world with no moral valence. It is an accomplishment.
Not the OP, but I do think that an infant is not worth much except their sentimental value to their family. A nitpick: “replaceability” is rather different from “worthlessness.” Humans are obviously pretty replaceable, as evidenced by us all being replaced in around half a century. The question that is interesting to ask is, how much does a society improve (economically?) when its childhood mortality falls?
All meaning is in our heads. That doesn’t make that meaning any less real. If someone places a lot of meaning on their infant dying, then the infant had a lot of value. If you want to put a dollar value on it, then you can ask the family how much they would pay to bring their child back to life. I would expect most people would pay a lot.
True, but the value is to them. (And what they pay to save the infant has a major signaling component. From what I see of my grandparents who lived in a much more traditional era (Iran’s modernization is more recent.), they did not value young children that much, and recognized the reality that they could just have another child relatively cheaply.) That value will be discounted heavily in my utility function, as it does not contribute either directly to me or to the core needs of my society. (Kind of reminds me of Malthusianism; Humanity right now could probably live a lot less bullshitty if it had controlled its population more intelligently.)
Yes, and not just in this case. Value is always to some individual: There is no value outside of someone’s brain. When we say “value to society”, that’s shorthand for “the aggregation of the value inside every individual’s head”.
Money measures some of the value inside people’s heads: You pay $20 for a shirt, and I can tell that you value the shirt by at least $20. When I go for a walk, I’m not paying anyone, but that doesn’t mean the value is $0.