Desire is the measure of all things

Returning from a photo trip to a field where I thought I had seen a rare species of butterfly (it wasn't) I was thinking out the "value" that such a discovery would bestow on the land. Money would be available for its conservation. People would be interested in it, and desire it.

It raised and solved the hindrance I have felt with conservation since I was a child (and why I don't work in conservation at the moment)... people by definition don't want it... if they did then we wouldn't need to conserve it.

What people want is row upon row of clothes shops selling fabrics with different patterns on in essentially the same shape with minor differences which attract a lot of attention. People also want restauants which sell essentially the same 5 meats, 15-20 vegetables, 10 sea foods in a variety of combinations which also attract a lot of attention. These are a few of our favourite things but the natural environment is not very well represented and indeed the natural environment is transformed to provide the above items.

There is no intrinsic value to the rare species of butterfly, just as there is no intrinsic value to a particular cut of fabric; what is different is that people desire the particular cut of fabric more than the particular cut of butterfly.

However there is a real difference beteen the latest fashion item and a butterfly: once the butterfly is extinct there is no way to recover it. This is not a black/white point but it does press for a resolution of value.

There are two things here: matter and ideas. Traditionally ideas are free but you need to pay for the acquisition of material objects. I imagine this is a practical issue of supply. However consider a society where ideas were protected by eleborate codes of secrecy like with the Greek Mysteries and the various secret societies today e.g. Masons. In such a world we might pay large amounts of money to enter into such societies, while in a world where mass production powered by very cheap energy would provide free acquistion of goods. Alternatively if we established a culture of sharing the the latter could be achieved also. As an aside I was thinking how free bikes might work. It was tried in Amsterdam but they were all stolen by people belonging to property systems outside. It might be that badly working bikes were more common so we could cycle them to a garage and have them replaced with a working bike - this way covering the maintenance. Only the garages would need to be funded then - but could easily be operated on a voluntary basis. My mother says of all this that it is "unrealistic" and that it is a "hard world" - except that such thinking is exactly what makes and maintains it as a hard world ;-) Anyway a diversion.

Returning to the main thread the point is that the butterfly could be just as valuable as a crutial city hospital if we so desire it, or as unvaluable as a piece of litter: the point is that there is no intrinsic value.

A friend's father once invited me out of the swimming pool at his home and sat me down and asked the 17 year old me what I was planning to do. I said Zoology and conservation. He, a doctor, said couldn't I think of something more useful. This essential point has lingered in my psyche all my life; it is the question of how best to use ones life; what exactly makes a life valuable; what would it mean to live one's life well and not waste it.

Well I realise there is no absolute answer in a free monetary market: it is simply a matter of what people desire.

Beyond the market there are many arguments about life but crutially they lie outside the mechanisms of economics. The real answers to these questions cannot be understood by markets, nor then can value really be established by markets.