Toward a New Value Standard in Economics

Abstract

The reason for considering the ‘practical and political implications of different views on value theory’ is to further economic progress broadly speaking by furthering economic knowledge. Ultimately, better economic policy and practice awaits better economic theory, method, and philosophy. Such progress revolves around the radical notion of demystification, so I will focus on value theory in relation to that task.

When the liberation of capacity no longer seems a menace to organization and established institutions, … making a living economically speaking will be at one with making a life that is worth living.

J. Dewey, 1920.

If economic value means anything at all, its meaning is that of a gradual and continuous realization of a more effective organization of the technological life-process.

C.E. Ayres, 1944.

The economic general theory must be the theory of institutional adjustment.

J.F. Foster, c. 1950.

Reprinted with the permission of James Rock, Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Utah, from Economic Forum (1982). Parts of this chapter were published in a similar paper in Alfred S. Eichner (ed.), Why Economics is not yet a Science, by M.E. Sharpe, whose permission to reprint is also gratefully acknowledged.