El Economical Value: a Presentation of its Measurements

How do economists value anything in order to understand that certain amount of goods worth the same as another amount of goods, or money? How do they value a group of heterogeneous things in order to make simple arithmetic operations? The answers to these and some similar questions lead us to the th...

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Autores:
Hernández Rodríguez, Isidro
Tipo de recurso:
Article of journal
Fecha de publicación:
2019
Institución:
Universidad Antonio Nariño
Repositorio:
Repositorio UAN
Idioma:
spa
OAI Identifier:
oai:repositorio.uan.edu.co:123456789/5431
Acceso en línea:
http://revistas.uan.edu.co/index.php/papeles/article/view/598
http://repositorio.uan.edu.co/handle/123456789/5431
Palabra clave:
theory of value
value measurement
economics history
teoría del valor
medida del valor
historia de la economía
Rights
openAccess
License
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Description
Summary:How do economists value anything in order to understand that certain amount of goods worth the same as another amount of goods, or money? How do they value a group of heterogeneous things in order to make simple arithmetic operations? The answers to these and some similar questions lead us to the theory of value, and this paper aims to present, in a didactical way, a single conceptual aspect: the unity of the value measurement. Any economic scholar knows that value has a huge complexity because it is related to some other essential theorical aspects, such as the theory of capital, the theory of production, and the theory of distribution. This document does not deal with such topics, although it has to mention them superficially. Its purpose is to briefly present why a unity of the value measurement is needed, and the difficulties faced by the economic theories in their searches, always taking in mind a reader with few bases in economics (specialists should turn to other books that deal with thattopic). In order to achieve its purpose, the text was written in a progressive way: from classical to contemporary economical thinking, from simple cases to complex ones. Therefore, the first part of the paper deals with the origin of the necessity of value measurements. Then it shows why the theory of value is important (such as the importance of its measurement), what leads us to explain the requirements that a value measurement must fulfil, and which sorts of solutions have been suggestedalong the time; finally, it closes with a general conclusion