Commentary
According to a sobering new report, the last quarter-century has seen a huge change in some significant traditional social values among the American populace—changes in attitudes toward patriotism, religion, and having children. But before addressing specific values, let’s examine the concept of “value” itself.
“Value” lies at the heart of economics. It’s the core concept from which the entire theoretical structure of economics is derived. The Austrian economist Carl Menger (1840–1921) made the key theoretical breakthrough that defined the neoclassical school of economics when he posited the subjective theory of value in 1871. By “subjective,” Menger meant that value wasn’t some pre-existing quality inherent in things, but that it originates in the mind and that individuals impute it to those things. Economic value is not an objective, fixed reality like size, weight, color, or possessing the identical potential utility for all humans, but rather is like art, of which we say that its “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”…