If you don't go ahead and assing values to a number of non-physical things, then electricians and plumbers and reactor builders and other infrastructural workers would always rate as the most productive members of society, while artists and the like would be seen as contributing nothing at all. Anyway that's a large part of what economics is -- people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.
...
'How is this different from the economics that already exists?' They all scoffed at once, Marina most persistently:
'...there's all kinds of phantom work! Unreal values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational executive class does nothing a computer couldn't do, and there are whole categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an ecological accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for making money only from the manipulation of money -- that is not only wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in such manipulation.'
-Red Mars
20100601
DMB 2010
Each to his own way, I'll go mine
Best of luck with what you find
But for your own sake, remember times
We used to know.
-Jethro Tull
Jah, ma olen reservis ja vaba ja rõõmus. Mul on hea meel, et saan jälle kirjutada ilma piiranguteta ja need kaks postitust, mis mu ülem käskis maha võtta, panin ka tagasi üles(I suffered censorship!).
Best of luck with what you find
But for your own sake, remember times
We used to know.
-Jethro Tull
Jah, ma olen reservis ja vaba ja rõõmus. Mul on hea meel, et saan jälle kirjutada ilma piiranguteta ja need kaks postitust, mis mu ülem käskis maha võtta, panin ka tagasi üles(I suffered censorship!).
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