FROM SUBJECTIVE TO OBJECTIVE VALUE
Thus far we have considered each man’s wants as ranged on a scale;
in correspondence with these wants, each man attaches degrees of
importance to the goods that come within his knowledge and control,
and ranges _goods_ also on a similar scale. We have seen that, owing
to the infinite subjective differences in men on the one hand, and
the effect of provision on the dependence of want on the other, every
man’s scale is different from every other man’s. That is to say, every
man, subjectively, attaches his own valuation to goods. As no man,
however, liveth to himself, these valuations come together and are
compared in every act of barter and exchange. The reflex influence of
the valuations that each man meets in any market, however simple, is
very great; constant contact of man with man in exchange assimilates
the valuations of all, till, unconsciously, we come very much to regard
the average valuation made by the people we meet as our own valuation.
For instance, in buying an article, if we looked solely and entirely
to what that article represented in life, pleasure, satisfaction,
self-realisation—however we name our subjective centre—we should,
perhaps, value it at 100. But if we meet everywhere with people who
value that article, say, from 50 to 60, it is inevitable that our
estimate should be strongly affected thereby. And this explains how
that, notwithstanding the enormous differences in temperament, culture,
and conditions, the valuations which meet on a market do not diverge
so widely as one would expect. If we consider that, of three men who
bid for a horse, the value of it to A may depend on his being a country
doctor, to B, on his being a hunting man, and to C, on his having a
sluggish liver, we could scarcely understand how these different values
come to be assessed within a few pounds or shillings of each other, if
it were not for this kind of arbitrage.
When we say, then, that men who meet as exchangers of different goods
put their own subjective valuations on the articles they bring to
market, we must be understood to mean valuations that are not more
subjective than man himself is. A man’s valuations can no more escape
being to a great extent the valuations of other men, than he himself
can escape being what other people “make” him.
How it comes that each man can compare the importance he attaches
to a commodity, as conditioning the satisfaction of want, with the
importance of a piece of metal or paper whose only “use” is to pass
on, belongs to a department of our science on which, happily, we do
not require to enter. It is sufficient for us to say that, in the
modern community, we measure “goods in general” by one good, and we
grow up so familiarised with the current money scale that no one sees
anything strange in valuing, say, a Bible, at thirty pence, or even
its author at thirty pieces! In other words, if I enter the market
as a buyer for a horse, with the figure of £50 in my mind as the
limit of my bid, it is not from a judgment that the horse to me is
equal to the satisfaction I could get from fifty gold sovereigns, but
from a judgment that the enjoyment or use to be got from the horse is
equal to the other personal satisfactions that fifty gold sovereigns
represent—to all the current wants of my life which I measure, in my
own mind, by that same scale, and count worth £50. The money value
is only the universal language in which we express our valuations
generally. Thus, through habit and education, it comes that it is more
definite and intelligible, either as regards ourselves or others, for
us to say that a horse is worth fifty sovereigns, than to say that it
is worth so many quarters of corn or hundredweights of iron.