Oscar Wilde once complained that 'economists know the price of everything but the value of nothing'. Well, the same could be said about current day markets and their over-pricing of risks (and under-pricing formerly). We are now in the era of dictatorship by the markets - let's bow down and offer sacrifices at the shrines of Moody's, Standard and Poor, IMF etc - because if you don't swallow the bitter cup of wage cuts, reductions in social welfare and cut-backs in frontline public services - you will get worse from the real and ultimate masters of economic fortune.
There is, however, another sense of price-value mismatch in the world of Robinson Crusoe economics - much of what passes for empirical economics is little more than value-laden theorising. Worse still, the value of human persons, communities and relationships takes a very secondary seat to the price of the 'factors of production' and the market-clearing solution based on implicit values that need to be challenged again and again. Economics needs to be cleaned up - this time on the basis that people really do matter.
Share:
![Duggan, Vic]](/assets/img/2017/04/1491994913319631_sq.jpg)
