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Oligopsony comments on How to deal with non-realism? - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: loup-vaillant 22 May 2012 01:58PM

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Comment author: Oligopsony 29 May 2012 01:44:56AM *  2 points [-]

No, because "value" had a pre-existing non-normative meaning in classical economics distinct from price. (Since this use of the word was already linked to value from the first, the phrase "labor theory of value" is redundant and as far as I know did not appear until marginalism dispensed with value.) A decent overview of the intellectual history if you are hopelessly nerdy enough to care is Ajit Sinha's Theories of Value from Adam Smith to Piero Sraffa.

It is of course reasonable to argue that the categories of classical economics were fundamentally confused and inferior to those of marginalism (or for that matter some other system,) but to do so on the basis that "value" referred to something normative is to be fundamentally confused yourself about what classical economists were saying, like assuming that a "final cause" for Aristotle must be the most recent cause to act on something.