Back to basics on economic value : Review article of Dave Elder-Vass's Inventing Value: The Social Construction of Monetary Worth, Cambridge University Press, 2022

Sayer, Andrew (2023) Back to basics on economic value : Review article of Dave Elder-Vass's Inventing Value: The Social Construction of Monetary Worth, Cambridge University Press, 2022. Contributions to Political Economy, 42 (1). pp. 101-116. ISSN 0277-5921

Abstract

The paper discusses concepts of economic value via a review of Dave Elder-Vass’s book Inventing Value. Setting the review in the context of the need to re-evaluate theories of economic value in light of the environmental crisis, it outlines and assesses the book’s critical realist approach to the subject, its critiques of existing value theories, the alternative offered by the author—‘the social construction of monetary worth’—and its application to the valuation of financial assets. It goes on to discuss whether economic value can be said to be ‘invented’, the relation between positive and normative theories of value, and what can be salvaged from existing theories of value. It ends by briefly summarising where value theory in the context of the wider economy might go from here.