🚀 go-pugleaf

I wrote:

>For the record, I do not think that the value of biodiversity is "infinite"
>-- I don't even know what that statement means. But neither do I think that
>the value of, say, grizzly bears, has some finite dollar amount. I regard the
>question about the value of grizzly bears as comparable to the question
>"what is the value of humanity?". I know there are many people who would
>say that the value of humanity is infinite, but they are suffering the same
>confusion. They think that the only way in which there could fail to be a 
>finite dollar value for humans or grizzly bears would be if their value was
>infinite. But there is another way, namely that the market premisses of the
>value scale do not apply: the dollar value of humans and grizzlys is undefined
>because we do not choose to subject them to market operations.


This point is so important, and so seldom understood, that it needs 
amplification.

Economic values are assigned, ultimately, by the operations of *markets*. But
what markets may *trade* is a question of social policy, not of economics. We
do not permit markets to trade human beings as slaves, so markets do not 
assign economic values for slaves. To say that this means that the economic
value of a human being is "infinite" is to make a fundamental mistake, namely
that of applying market principles where they *cannot* be applied given the
way that society is structured. Markets do not decide how society is 
structured, or what may legally be traded -- those decisions are not market
decisions. They are ethical decisions. 

I am advocating that biological diversity should be protected so that the
risk of extinction of a species or unique population is not materially 
increased by human economic activities. In effect, this is a restriction
on what markets may trade: they may not trade a significantly increased 
risk of extinction for another species for a human benefit. Markets do not
as a result assign an "infinite" value to biodiversity, any more than they
assign an "infinite" value to slaves. They don't assign *any* legitimate 
economic value in those cases, as the items are not legally traded. 

Of course, there are *costs* associated with adopting and enforcing such 
a policy of protection, but the costs are all finite, just as they are
for any other policy. Nowhere in any cost accounting for protection of
biological diversity need a poor bean-counter grapple with an infinite 
value. 

	*	*	*	*	*	*	*

The widespread confusion about this subject, BTW, is a result of years of 
intense propaganda by people with a specific political program of contracting 
government regulation in every possible area.  The myth has been created that 
*all* value is economic value, assigned by markets. But no society has ever 
worked that way. All actual societies exemplify a hierarchy of different 
ways of assigning values to things, of which economic values are only one 
tier, and never the most important tier. 

The econocentric myth is now very powerful and pervasive, so much so that
many people who would not accept the motivations behind it have uncritically
accepted the idea that all talk about the value of anything, if it is to have
any meaning, must be talk about economic values. Whenever a value which 
"trumps" economic considerations in the social value hierarchy is considered, 
it becomes a source of confusion from this point of view, and the confusion 
expresses itself in the claim that the value is somehow "infinite". When
you hear such a claim, you are encountering another intellectual casualty
of a deliberate propaganda effort, an effort to transform *citizens* of a
*polity* capable of weighing and acting upon noneconomic values through the
operation of the public sector, into *consumers* who have no such ability and
who are even hostile towards the idea.

In other words, it's an attempt at psychological disenfranchisment. I leave it
as an excercise for the reader to figure out who benefits from this general
disenfranchisment and who loses.

------------
Alan McGowen