I’ve seen the Blogshares logo at some of the online places I frequent, so I clicked on it today. Interesting: a self-described “fantasy stock market for weblogs” where “weblogs are valued by inbound links.” Vanity must be fed, so I checked out my value, and was delighted and a little flattered to see that Torill, bless her, owns a piece of this place. And my first thought was: how do I increase my value? Blogshares would seem to be an economy that rewards, to use an inelegant term, linkwhoring, but in looking at the messages there, it’s clear that some folks are making fantasy fortunes via speculation. There’s been a lot of interesting stuff written about economies on the Web — Jill’s post a while back comes immediately to mind, as do some of the really smart articles at First Monday — and it makes me ask, especially with some of the questions I raised in yesterday’s post and my ongoing wonderings about the production and consumption of online writing, how do things get valued on the Web?
For Web writing, neoclassical economics (with its logic of tastes and preferences) seems to me to carry a lot more explanatory power than Marxian economics. Marxian economics, according to Wolff and Resnick, sets the value of a capitalist commodity as being dependent upon the sum of the values of the materials needed to produce the commodity, the paid living labor needed to produce the commodity, and the unpaid living labor needed to produce the commodity. (Note that “dependent upon” does not mean “equal to”: Wolff and Resnick tell us that Marxian economics “insists that labor inputs and their values are themselves overdetermined by output commodities and their values” [163]). I’d wager that the authors of some undervalued weblogs put as much work into their writing as Andrew Sullivan puts into his, and so it seems to me that Marxian economics fails to explain the huge variations in Blogshares stock prices.
The easy response here would be to suggest that Blogshares is play money and not a “real” economy, but that only defers the question of valuation. I don’t have much interest in joining the speculative interaction at Blogshares — trying to intelligently invest the small sum my mother’s life insurance paid keeps me busy enough with the non-virtual stock market — but the question of how to value writing fascinates me. Like practically everybody else, I “advertise” writing that I regularly enjoy with a link in my blogroll; unlike some folks, I don’t link to everybody who links to me, as rude as that may be. In that distinction alone, there’s something: links, for me, mean not “Thanks!” but “Check this out!” And there’s also the desire for some transfer to my pedagogy: like so many teachers, I want what we do in the classroom to matter, to be more than just dress rehearsal. So I use John Trimbur’s essay (254K .pdf) to reassure myself that it does matter, that composition isn’t just a service course, and it makes me ask: how much does it matter?
Asking such questions yields further questions. For one thing, my concern with valuation makes me realize that this is a question of valuation in the classroom. Much of the other stuff I’ve been writing about has had to do with student backgrounds: who they are in the years before coming into the classroom. And my questions about the purposes of liberal and vocational educations have to do with who students will be after leaving the classroom. So I need to ask myself: will this dissertation undertake a synchronic or diachronic view of class?
Regarding the discrepancy between work put into something and its price, two words: transformation problem!
First problem with valuation on the web would be – a lot of really good things just don’t get seen because there are so many blogs, good bad and indifferent. Thus, any theory of valuation has to account for what is in fact seen and what isn’t. If value is dependant solely on numbers, a lot of “good” things, be they books, films, music records, weblogs, would need to be re-evaluated.
Then, most valuation seems to me to be purely personal – I revisit sites I have come across that have stimulated my thinking and have brought me things I didn’t know before. Some are just a great pleasure to read. I can’t decide abstractly which amongst these is better.
To expand a bit on the hit-and-run post I made above: on my recollection, classical economics, meaning Locke, Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, talks of value and price; neoclassicals talk only of price. All the classicals had labor theories of value, not price. There were differences between those theories, but they all shared that much.
In volume I of Capital, Marx makes a simplifying assumption: for the purposes of his analysis at this point, he will assume that prices=values. In fact, one of the things he wants to show is that gross exploitation does not take place in the market: see the funny account in Ch 3, Sec 2 of Capital of the spinner who goes to market to sell his linen for 2 pound and in turn buys a bible, “he being a gentleman of the old school”, while the Bible salesman goes to buy some brandy with the same 2 pound.
But this is not simple barter, since such transactions continue ad infinitum, with the money exchanged not being “extinguished” in the process; there is a huge social net of exchange, so it is the aggregate of all commodities that appear that is the necessary condition for exhange. Likewise for labor; not the individual’s labor, but the total social labor power available is the necessary condition for capitalist production. It was on this account that Marx said that “labor chits,” a form of currency based on an individual’s labor time I believe proposed by Proudhon (and I think taken up by the USSR in its early years!) would NOT work as currency: the total social labor power creates the mass of commodities and therefore a surplus; allocating buying power to each person based on their individual time worked would therefore result in a shortage of purchasing power.
All fine and good–but how to get from values to prices? Even if in the real world, individual prices do not equal values, on the whole the aggregate of prices should be convertable. That’s the transformation problem, and it’s on that point Marxian economics failure–or is supposed to fail, because I’m only taking it from second hand accounts that Marx never solved the transformation problem, or that it is insoluble in a value vs. price framework.
So if Marxian economics fails to explain the problems it sets out for itself, why the hell bother with it? Well, Platonic metaphysics and theories of mind from Descartes to Husserl have have gone by the boards, but people still read them, and not just for entertainment. My feeling–and I’m probably in the minority here–is that to the end, whether he intended to be or not, Marx was a philosopher, and besides philosophy when he lived was more closely connected with economics than it is now–although from Putnam’s book, it seems Sen is trying to bring them back together. The amazing parts of Capital (and the one that I think animates all the analysis that follows, although I guess in way, way in the minority here) to me are those that deal with commodity fetishism, a term that these days seems to degenerated to a fancy swear word for consumerism, but by which he meant that value and price were misperceived as being somehow a property of the commodity itself, rather than being a function of the social relationships around the commodity. This insight still survives if one drops “value” from one’s framework: the price an item draws at market is a function of the social framework that created it, not the actual properties of the commodity itself. I remember reading arguments in computer trade industry papers years ago that software consumers needed to see marketing and advertising efforts on the part of software vendors as part of the "value" vendors added to their products. The notion being that a software consumers, be they indivudal consultants buying development tools or Fortune 500 companies buying ERP software, have an interest in their vendors staying in business (you don’t want to be stuck relying on an unsupported product, do you?) and marketing and advertising are necessary to keep vendors in business. Of course one doesn’t want to be the fool stuck depending on a piece of software whose vendor has gone under, but the description of this state of affairs as “adding value” to the software is backwards: marketing, rather, is the direct and conscious effort to shape the subsociety of those whose livelihood depends on their software purchases.