Here the question of value arises. Let us imagine a person who has everything, or rather, who can acquire anything without difficulty. What should we call him? Most likely, rich. How do we measure his wealth? This is far from a trivial question. It is one of the most important for understanding economics. For the sake of clarity, let us consider three versions of a rich person — billionaire Gates, Comrade Stalin, and a saintly hermit named Brahmaputra. Billionaire Gates can obtain many things because he has a large stock of money. Comrade Stalin can obtain absolutely anything available in nature without any money at all, simply because he is Comrade Stalin. The saintly hermit is no different from these two figures, because he too has everything he needs. These three people, despite their great differences, are undoubtedly rich.
Another example. Many have heard the expression “old money.” Old money is not so much money per se as capital, connections, experience, and other opportunities. They allow their owners to obtain what others cannot buy even with money. Are the owners of old money rich? Undoubtedly. But their fortunes in purely monetary form may be insignificant.
Wealth, within the scope of this note, can be defined as the ease with which we can obtain the goods we need. But let us return to value. Now it will be easier to sort this out. One of the reasons people poorly understand what they themselves do is that the version of economic language we encounter in everyday life emphasizes numbers and “indicators.” In this language, value has monetary expression in the form of price. But here is a simple question — what happens to a commodity after it is bought? What is its price then? Where has it suddenly disappeared to?
When we begin to sort this out, we see that it is not so much commodities that possess value, but rather certain notions about the value of goods give rise to certain commodities. How many Porsche cars do you need for happiness? Or do you prefer a Rolls-Royce? How much are the books you bought but never read worth? Why do you say you will “never wear these trousers”? And why do you dislike shiny sweatpants with stripes so much? From my observations, every Ukrainian owns considerable stocks of bed linen. At the same time, only a small part of it is ever used. These goods came from the times when linen was not just rags but a sign of status. Other goods of the same type — carpets and crystal, for example — despite having been sold in their time at serious prices and even “under the table,” are now not only unbought but driven out in shame from modern homes. These examples can be continued ad infinitum.
Value has an exclusively subjective nature. What one person needs, another does not need at all, and this circumstance — that we are all different — is precisely the reason for the existence of such a phenomenon as “economics.” Even things that seem to us unambiguously objective, such as food or shelter, are not truly such. Objectivity means that these needs exist independently of our will, but clearly this is not the case. People can voluntarily refuse food in order to achieve other goals they consider more important.