We need to distinguish between units of exchange and units of valuation here.
Money is an unit of exchange—things in very different domains can be converted into money, and monetary trades can occur in very small or very large quantities among many far-away strangers as well as next-door neighbors, and it all gets factored into One Price (so far as transaction costs and liquidity permit).
But, it’s backwards to figure out the cost of playing a game, by pricing your hourly rate. You already know how much an hour of play costs you—an hour, plus setup time and recovery time. Money is useful for estimating how many hours of gaming (or time with your family, or health care services, or square feet per month, or and of those things for friends, or contributions to a community center, or whatever else you’re buying) something is yielding you or costing you.
Time is a more natural (though still highly imperfect) unit of valuation. Warren Buffett’s time can probably command a price orders of magnitude higher than your time can, and his wife probably isn’t orders of magnitude better to spend time with than yours is, but you probably spend a similar share of your time—well within an order of magnitude—with your respective wives.
But the labor theory of value is terrible at market pricing. For markets, you need a currency. So, there’s a tendency to slip from the awareness that anything could be traded, into the habit of assessing the value of everything in currency terms even when that makes no sense.
Oh, once again I think I see a misconception. I have no expectation that everything be valued or priced in dollars. Value (to each agent) is multidimensional, and costs (resources used) are multidimensional, not always even with the same dimensions. Money is just one flattening of a small set of dimensions, and does not capture anywhere near everything about a preference. Values flatten only in an actor’s decision of which future universe-state they prefer, and for that purpose value is unitless and only ordinally-comparable.
The cost of playing a game is that you won’t experience the universe where you didn’t play that game. You trade one universe for another with each decision you make. Whether money is involved is a tiny subset of that decision.
It seems to me like Zvi’s trying to use the commonsense meaning of “trade” with all of its connotational loading and built-in implicit biases, to describe a common cluster of actual human behavior, and compare that with sacredness, and you’re getting hung up on the fact that you want to use the word in a more formal way that doesn’t commit to those connotations.
I keep seeing you defend the coherence of the way you use the concept. I grant that it’s coherent, at least locally, but attention spent on that is attention not spent on engaging with what Zvi is actually trying to say. Asking for clarification can be a way to build a solid basis for interaction, but we’ve pretty much just repeated the exchange we had here.
I wonder if you (and maybe Zvi) are confusing “trade” with “market”. I make no claims that any given market is capable of generating a “correct price” for any given individual trade, or even that such a concept is coherent. Instead, each trade is idiosyncratic to the involved parties and their particular valuations of the actions or objects exchanged.
We need to distinguish between units of exchange and units of valuation here.
Money is an unit of exchange—things in very different domains can be converted into money, and monetary trades can occur in very small or very large quantities among many far-away strangers as well as next-door neighbors, and it all gets factored into One Price (so far as transaction costs and liquidity permit).
But, it’s backwards to figure out the cost of playing a game, by pricing your hourly rate. You already know how much an hour of play costs you—an hour, plus setup time and recovery time. Money is useful for estimating how many hours of gaming (or time with your family, or health care services, or square feet per month, or and of those things for friends, or contributions to a community center, or whatever else you’re buying) something is yielding you or costing you.
Time is a more natural (though still highly imperfect) unit of valuation. Warren Buffett’s time can probably command a price orders of magnitude higher than your time can, and his wife probably isn’t orders of magnitude better to spend time with than yours is, but you probably spend a similar share of your time—well within an order of magnitude—with your respective wives.
But the labor theory of value is terrible at market pricing. For markets, you need a currency. So, there’s a tendency to slip from the awareness that anything could be traded, into the habit of assessing the value of everything in currency terms even when that makes no sense.
Oh, once again I think I see a misconception. I have no expectation that everything be valued or priced in dollars. Value (to each agent) is multidimensional, and costs (resources used) are multidimensional, not always even with the same dimensions. Money is just one flattening of a small set of dimensions, and does not capture anywhere near everything about a preference. Values flatten only in an actor’s decision of which future universe-state they prefer, and for that purpose value is unitless and only ordinally-comparable.
The cost of playing a game is that you won’t experience the universe where you didn’t play that game. You trade one universe for another with each decision you make. Whether money is involved is a tiny subset of that decision.
It seems to me like Zvi’s trying to use the commonsense meaning of “trade” with all of its connotational loading and built-in implicit biases, to describe a common cluster of actual human behavior, and compare that with sacredness, and you’re getting hung up on the fact that you want to use the word in a more formal way that doesn’t commit to those connotations.
I keep seeing you defend the coherence of the way you use the concept. I grant that it’s coherent, at least locally, but attention spent on that is attention not spent on engaging with what Zvi is actually trying to say. Asking for clarification can be a way to build a solid basis for interaction, but we’ve pretty much just repeated the exchange we had here.
I wonder if you (and maybe Zvi) are confusing “trade” with “market”. I make no claims that any given market is capable of generating a “correct price” for any given individual trade, or even that such a concept is coherent. Instead, each trade is idiosyncratic to the involved parties and their particular valuations of the actions or objects exchanged.
FYI this was helpful to me and apologies if I was rounding you off to a stereotype.