Value
A critical concept in understanding technological choice
There’s no understanding technological choice of any sort without understanding all the ways “value” works—all the different ways we calculate (which is in many cases probably too precise a term) what something is worth—what costs we are willing to bear for a certain choice. Value is a moving target; it’s so context-relative that, in order to grasp it accurately, we need a whole grasp of context.
On the simple end of the example spectrum would be how I feel about going out to lunch these days. The last time my wife and I went out to lunch, we had a sandwich and salad at the art museum café. It was good. It was also $71.00. Lunch isn’t worth $71.00 to me, so I won’t be doing that again. But it might be useful to consider why lunch isn’t worth $71.00 to me.
First, I have no income; everything we spend comes out of my wife’s paycheck. It has been that way for many years and there’s no reason to think it won’t continue to be until one of us inherits money. So, $71.00 is twice as much cost to us as it would be if each of us made the same as she does. If my wife were a surgeon or hedge fund manager (whatever that is), $71.00 would be between a third and a tiny fraction of the cost that it represents to us in the real world, and my lack of income would be irrelevant.
Aside from a simple financial calculus, though, we have the fact that both of us work at home, we can afford to buy good food, and my wife is about as good as amateur cooks get. So, we eat high-quality meals at home three times a day, every day. That means a good lunch in a restaurant is not as valuable to us as it would be for a couple who don’t or can’t cook well.
Without knowing all of that, no one could really know why I came to the conclusion that lunch out is not worth $71.00.
My dear old friend tends to say things like “I can’t imagine spending $X-thousand dollars on a car.” To which I reply, “That’s because you don’t make $X-thousand dollars a year.” My point is solid, but not comprehensive. Two people who each make $300,000 a year might well have two very different takes on the desirability of a $100,000 car, even if the financial calculus for each of them is identical. With a three-hundred-grand-a-year income, I’d spend a hundred K on a car in a heartbeat. My friend would not. He’d spend it on something I wouldn’t.
When I’m thinking about value in technological choice, I find it helpful to consider a list of resources, and the cost in each for a specific choice to a specific person or people in a specific context. In the whole of the human social experience, ours is an anomalous society—hyper-specialized, with almost every transaction conducted using an abstract currency system. Any currency-based transaction depends on both parties agreeing on a value of that currency, but in our economy, that agreement is for all practical purposes universal, rather than case-by-case or individual-to-individual. With the demise of paper checks, the last quasi-negotiable instrument of monetary transaction has gone away. When I was young, whether or not someone would “take your check” depended on how trustworthy they thought you were. Now, any negotiation that takes place is in setting a price, or, in some cases, negotiating that price. If you set a price for something and no one will pay it, then there is an insurmountable gap between your assessment of value and other people’s. You either lower the price, wait for the economy to change, or keep whatever it is you were going to sell.
For the vast majority of humans before the present moment, “value” was judged in more ways than just dollars or pounds or Euros or yen. For us to relate to that, it helps to consider the ways in which we still do judge value in other ways—and we do.
Even though I don’t enjoy doing it, it’s worth it to me to replace fence posts as necessary rather than hire someone to do it for me. I’ll try to break down all the reasons I can think of as to why that is.
First, as noted, I have no income. So, the cost of hiring labor is far more expensive for me than for someone with my CV who is employed as a full professor.
Second, I know how to replace fence posts; I’ve invested the time and effort into learning that—primarily because of the first reason. I have the (simple) tools necessary to do it. So, that adds weight in the column for DIY.
Third, I have access to help—my wife and/or a handyman who will do stuff for us. (By “will do stuff,” I mean “will agree to work for us at his standard hourly rate”—these days, just finding someone competent who will do work for you is nothing to take for granted.) Even if I hire him to help, the time-and-effort savings will offset the extra monetary cost sufficiently to justify it.
As a corollary to that, I’m 57; I will not risk injury the way I would have at 37. While I may not feel it, I know that I’m not as resistant to injury or as resilient in recovery as I was twenty years ago, just because of age. So, I’m more likely to enlist help for a job like that than I was then, and that changes the value equation.
The first three of these are predicated on the assumption that replacement of the fence posts is necessary. For me, it is; I don’t tolerate things that are broken, damaged, sub-par, out of place, ugly. Other people tolerate those things just fine. We walk past a house every day with a fence that’s part-fence and part-used-to-be-a-fence. It looks like homemade sin and I wouldn’t have it for a day. So, aesthetic and other idiosyncratic considerations factor into “value” as well.
We have to think of all these things if we want to understand how someone has computed value in a certain situation. We could assume that the aforementioned hypothetical full professor would hire out this job without a second thought. That would be a risky assumption; plenty of people with good incomes do jobs like that either because they enjoy it or because they would rather do the work than spend the money. (We sometimes refer to such people as “cheap”—you don’t call a poor person “cheap.” You call an affluent person who won’t spend money on things they can easily afford “cheap.”) “Cheapness” could make it challenging for someone to work out why someone had computed value the way they had.
So, turning to an example from HoT, consider two five-meter boats, intended to carry a crew of two and a catch of fish. Assume that, other than that, they have little in common. Why? Some of the reasons will be obvious—one is made of reed bundles waterproofed with bitumen, and the other is made of a hollowed-out log with shaped planks attached to its sides. Most if not all of that difference will be attributable to availability of materials. Where that might get more interesting is when, say, planks and nails become available in a place accustomed to building and using reed-bundle boats. The take-up of nailed-plank boats may proceed quickly, but it may not—there is a significant investment of time and effort involved in learning how to build in the new way, and the builders have already invested time and effort into learning the old way. Boat and ship builders and operators also tend to be conservative; they have to be, since trial-and-error can so easily become trial-and-error plus death. Unfamiliarity with the nailed-plank boat may impede uptake for some time, until the local builders and operators are satisfied that the novel technology would meet their needs better than what they have been using. If they decide, on the other hand, that what they’re already using works well enough, for what it costs, uptake of the novel technology is unlikely.
What do planks and nails cost? Do the locals have anything to trade for them? If so, do they come dear, or for a modest price? Do the locals have the tools for working planks and nails? If not, what do those cost? And “cost” there is not just money, but time and effort to learn to use.
Because ships can travel globally, and have for at least a thousand years, and probably longer, maritime peoples have consistently been exposed to foreign watercraft technology. It gets interesting when we have the source material to delve into what foreign technology gets adopted by whom, how fast, to what extent, and for what purpose(s).
As I discussed in one of the Leeway audio essays, Europeans did not ever adopt the surf canoes of the West Africans, even though it would have freed them from their reliance on skilled African labor—its cost and its availability, as well as the risk of putting themselves entirely at the mercy of people who may or may not wish them harm. Why? Because to do so would have required acquiring the considerable skill necessary to operate these craft successfully, and that, in turn, would have required a degree of comfort in the water, and adeptness at swimming and surfing, that Europeans did not possess. The Africans were acclimated from childhood. For the Europeans, the “value” calculus here did not come down to money or its equivalent.
Even in a society with a universal currency system, then, we have to think about “value” broadly, and try to think of all the aspects of it that may factor into a calculus of value that, in turn, determines a technological choice.