The Value of MoneyAnderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
General
The Value of Money
Anderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
Money
in the determination of general prices, rather than a mere reflection of
them. It is to be a coefficient with the objective values of goods in
determining prices. A change in general prices may be caused by a change
in the value of money, and may be caused by a change in the values of
goods (II, p. 511). In explaining this objective value concept (which,
in its formal and logical aspects, is in many ways similar to the
absolute social value concept maintained by the present writer, though,
in the present writer's judgment, inadequately accounted for by Wieser,
so far as a psychological causal theory is concerned) Wieser objects to
the term, "objective value" which he had used in the earlier article. He
prefers "volkswirtschaftlicher Wert." (This term is perhaps best
rendered "public economic value," for present purposes, to distinguish
it, on the one hand, from individual or personal value, and, on the
other, from the social economic value concept of the present writer. At
the same time, the connotation of a communistic or authoritive value
must not be read into the term. It is, in its formal and logical
aspects, really the most common of all the value notions, and may, best
of all perhaps, be translated simply "value," or "economic value," or
"absolute value." But for the present discussion, we shall call it
"public economic value.") This public economic value, in the case of
goods, is not a mere objective relation between a good and its
price-equivalent. It is a subjective (psychological) value, like
personal value. If one wishes to call it objective value, one is using
objective in the sense of the general subjective as distinguished from
the personal individual idiosyncracy (II, p. 502). The objective
exchange value of goods (here Wieser uses "objektiver Tauschwert" as the
equivalent of his "volkswirtschaftlicher Wert" above mentioned) is the
common subjective part of the individual valuations leaving out the
remainder of individual peculiarities ("der allgemein subjective Teil
der persoenlichen Wertschaetzungen mit Verschweigung des individual
eigenartig empfundenen Restes").[72] Wieser does not seem to me to think
out clearly the distinction between absolute and relative value in this
connection. He wishes to get something more fundamental than a mere
relation between goods and money; he wishes a psychological phenomenon.
He wishes to have a value of goods which can be set over against the
value of money, the two, in combination, determining prices. And yet, he
wishes somehow to get these out of the prices themselves. "We must seek
a concept of the public economic value of money which, to be sure,
proceeds from the general price-level (_Preisstand_), but which excludes
from its content everything that comes purely from the value of goods"
(II, 511). To the public economic value of money, however, Wieser gives
no independent definition. The definition runs in terms of the values of
the goods.
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