I think this sums up the disconnect. Value is intersubjective, it’s based on a widespread social agreement, and the intersubjective facts are empirically demonstrable. You demonstrate the objective value of money every time you exchange it for goods and services, or exchange your labor or its fruits for cash. As such, it’s value is an objective fact about the world.
The fact that its value may change over time, and may differ from place to place, doesn’t make it subjective. Even the fact that one individual may choose to reject all money or to value it differently does not make its value subjective, any more than one person refusing to use a specific word or using a word idiosyncratically deprives that word of its usual meaning.
If the orderbook for a stock has several bids to buy at a range of prices, then what is the value of the stock? One guy says he will buy 100 shares @ $10, but another guy says he will sell 100 shares at $11. What is the value? It isn’t the “last” price because that’s history and is nothing more than a coincidence of subjective valuing.
Value is determined and issued by individuals and not a collective agreement or consensus among them as if buyers and sellers got together to set the price.
That’s right, but the fact that value changes from person to person does.
Sure if a large group of people subjectively value something similarly, then you’ll have a large pool to trade with at a seeming objective value, but that value could suddenly change on the whim of some central banker who chooses the wrong language.
If I would call a person who is 6"2’, “tall”, but you think that someone isn’t “tall” until they are at least 6’3", is “tall” meaningless?
It is both. If I have access to a large number of buyers, then the consensus price of a stock matters greatly: it will affect both the price I can sell it for, and the price others are willing to buy it for. I can sell it to the person who is willing to pay me the most, and that person’s bid will be based in part on the information that others will pay a similar price.
It’s true that each transaction is between two individuals, but then we are just two individuals talking and using words that are defined by the consensus of a speaker population. The individuals in a market make their decisions in the context of consensus around a price, it’s incomplete to look at that transaction as just concerning the two individuals involved and their purely subjective preferences.
But this is true of everything, every concept is subject to sudden changes of meaning on the basis of new information. If we discovered that apples were poisonous, the concept of ‘apple’ would change immediately. When we found out that ‘jade’ was really two different materials, the concept changed immediately. A piece of clothing that was ugly can become attractive and hip if Kim Kardashian (or whoever, I’m not up on who’s hip) suggests it’s the next big thing. A white and gold dress can become blue and black by providing more information about the lighting at the time it was photographed.
Name me an attribute of anything, I’m reasonably confident I can come up with a plausible way in which that attribute could be changed in concept by the introduction of new information. And if that’s so, then this criticism doesn’t undermine the objective truth of the value of money unless it undermines all objective truth.
If you say someone is tall, I can never know what you mean, so it’s objectively meaningless.
There is no consensus price. If I want to sell stock, I don’t ask what everyone else thinks of the idea, but even if I did, that still would be my subjective view that popularity determines value since someone else may not value it with the same method. If many participants value it the same, then it is a co-incidence of subjective valuing. Objective valuing would be more like price dictation by the state so the value would not depend on subjective opinion. For instance when gold was set at $35 by law, then everyone valued gold at $35 and what the dollar was worth was subjective.
Even when buyers bid prices up in competition, they still have a maximum price they are willing to pay. If I value a house at $100k, I can’t pay over that amount. If I get excited by the bidding process and up my bid, then I’ve changed my subjective value of the house depending on what someone else is willing to pay based on his subjective valuing of what others are willing to pay, but it’s not a consensus since many are priced out of the market and their valuing is now inconsequential. If I buy the house, I am the one who solely determined its value with my subjective assessment of things, which may have been misplaced by the excitement of the bidding process itself.
Notice how you said “consensus around a price” and not “of a price”. So the consensus price is fuzzy and not so certain because it’s a pool of subjective opinions.
No, of course, suddenness doesn’t mean anything. I was just describing how fragile subjective valuing is. When the gold price was $35, anybody could say just about anything and it wouldn’t change the price (except announcing the repeal of the law).
Maybe another example is the objective valuing of BMI for what determines “obese”. Or perhaps what BP determines “high blood pressure”, which is somewhat subjective depending which country you ask, but objective concerning all doctors in the country since their opinions don’t matter.
I think our disagreement here is largely semantic. I would say the word “tall” has an objective meaning, even if it isn’t specific or uniform. If I point to two people standing side by side, and one is 5’8" and the other is 6’3", and I tell you that “the tall one is my brother”, you know which one is my brother, there is no ambiguity. In the sense I am using the term “objective”, that is evidence that the word “tall” has an objective meaning.
One revealing difference is in what conclusions we draw from the fact that price is based on “a pool of subjective opinions”. Compare how you are describing price to how we might describe the rate of flow of a river, or the wind speed of a hurricane, or the rainfall during a storm. There are lots of difficulties in measuring these quantities, but it doesn’t make them meaningless or illusory or subjective.
But note also that price isn’t just a pool of subjective opinions, but a network of subjective opinions. The price that an individual is willing to pay for something is influenced by the price that others are willing to pay for it, because what others are willing to pay changes the expected return. I might value gold jewelry at zero in terms of using it for myself (and I do), but because other people value gold jewelry, I would be willing to pay hundreds a piece of gold jewelry that I intend to turn around and sell for thousands.
I don’t disagree that a gold value peg is objective, or even that it’s objective in a different way from a floating valuation, but I don’t think that means that the floating valuation isn’t “objective”. Maybe I’m being sloppy here, and it’s better to treat intersubjective facts as neither subjective nor objective, but I do think they act more like objective facts that subjective facts.
While a gold peg currency is still obviously more valuable than one without it there is the acknowledgement that the world’s global gold supply in terms of numbers is actually quite small where it will never be a viable currency for seven plus billion people worldwide in usage.
Yes, “tall” used in relativity is meaningful, but abstractly it doesn’t carry much meaning. If there were only one object in the universe, could you say it is tall?
Well, just like each person values differently, each particle in a river or hurricane travels at different speeds. We could say the average speed is the speed of the wind or water, but it seems a misappropriation to describe it as objective since “average” is more unambiguous and “objective” can be reserved to describe other phenomenon.
I think, in the truest sense, or in essence, an objective situation has no observer because any observer will only be able to observe subjectively. Therefore it seems these words are interchangeable with “relative” and “abstract”. So subjective value would be value assigned to the object relative to the subject whereas objective value would assign value abstractly regardless if subjects exist (no observer). Of course, that doesn’t make much sense, but objectivity rarely does. When asked to take an objective view, we must use a lens of subjective rules for what objectivity means, which most often means “logical” without emotion, so “objective view” = logical view", but it isn’t really objective. Or perhaps I may want someone to take an objective view of my life and even though all I can get is a subjective opinion, it’s more objective than my own introspection. I think it’s easy to conflate several different meanings and perhaps there could be degrees of objectivity in light of that.
Even if a subject consults the network for influence, it’s still a subjective interpretation on whether or how to interpret what the network values. I can see your point though and it does seem like value is dictated without us having much say in it.
You could be right and it may boil down to how we define the words.