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Comment by chermi | Hacker News Reader

But why would you base anything on an incorrect theory? If you value things by LTV, you're not going to like the results.

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You are empirically incorrect

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23602188

Are you saying the validity of the LTV is a 60 citation comment paper who's metric of correctness is correlation with market prices? And we just ignore everything else?

Prices track labor inputs extremely closely, using the LTV yields a 0.90+ correlation coefficient to real world prices.

Mainstream economics doesn’t even have a non-tautological theory of equilibrium price.

So what “everything else” are you referring to?

Well I have a lot to say but I don't see much use. Just to restare 1) LTV is correct because it correlates with the system you disagree with and that it's superior to? 2) The best evidence overturning all of the consensus and evidence against LTV is a 60 citation comment on a paper? My shittiest paper has more citations than that and it's 5 years old. Something confirming LTV would be a nobel memorial for sure.

How would you know if there's no empiric evidence? Let me tell you, I'm not loving the results of the current pricing system, fwiw.

Well first let's agree on terms. What do you think the purpose of a price is? What should it represent?

I tend to agree with the LTV definition:

> The labor theory of value (LTV) posits that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the socially necessary labor time required to produce it under prevailing conditions

Ok, so the purpose of prices to you is not to convey information about what's needed?

That is correct! I would also posit that if that is the main point of a market pricing mechanism, I'm also not fully sold it works as intended?

As a follow-up: If we have full labor input as baseline, we have other ways to adjust the price to steer behavior. For example, we could properly price in environmental cost and steer consumption towards a socioeconomic system that can survive the environmental crisis.

I see the framing of "optimal" pricing as inherently ideological. "Optimal" for achieving which socioeconomic goal?

Pricing externalities is not a feature unique to LTV.

Is your position that your pricing is not more "optimal" than market based pricing? Just because you're using moral terms doesn't mean you're not making a value judgement.

So the purpose of prices is to comply with LTV? Prices carry information from individual needs and desires in markets. And incentive production to meet that demand. What do they do in your system? My understanding from this thread and the other is basically their purpose is to comply with LTV. And also at the same time they're right because they correlate with market prices? I'm legitimately confused.

>How would you know if there's no empiric evidence?

If theres no empiric evidence, how can you claim that you can simply use LTV to price market inputs?

We can't make a claim either way without empiric evidence.

We do, however, have plenty of empiric evidence for how the current pricing mechanism works and based on that I figure it might be time to try something new?

Current pricing (as a system) is honestly pretty good, its largely the limitation of corporate liability that permits the scale to be out of balance.

Did you forget about the all of the evidence from other systems? No economic system will satisfy everyone. In the meantime I prefer one that is (more) determined by individual preference and motive vs one relying on experts who swear it will be different this time while also claiming "actually it's never been tried" and that they know better than you what you want.

You are arguing with a communist. The ideology / theory is just window dressing, it doesn’t matter at all, they still want to take your stuff and kill those who oppose them. There is no marketplace of ideas, just a trap.

Ad Hominem.

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