It's an old mistake, perhaps people should stop making it?

Zoe Williams makes a very old mistake:

And there’s an overarching fallacy, that a job many people could do must be inherently low in value.

That lots of people are capable of doing the work, willing to do so, means that the supply is large. The larger it is compared to the demand for that work to be done the lower the price will be. This is why 90% of the actors in the world work buckshee. The number of those who enjoy treading the stage is rather larger than the number we wish to see doing so.

But that is, in the phrase, to know the price and not the value. Which is where that old error is. Aquinas brought it back into Western philosophic thought, Aristotle laid it out, the idea that there is some objective value that can be divined. Something that simply isn’t true.

The only people out here doing the valuations are us humans. Therefore the value is what we place upon it. It is something subjective therefore - what are we willing to pay for this thing, that service or their time and effort?

It’s still possible to go on and insist that there’s some societal value which is different from the individual. We might not think, or I or they etc, that social care is worth more than is currently paid for it but society as a whole does. Well, OK, we have a method of testing that insistence. For the market price is the summation of what we all are prepared to pay for it, whatever it is.

That is, the market price is the average of what we all think something is worth. If you desire that something be paid its true and real value then, given that it is just us humans doing the valuing, the market price is that value. Which is where that ancient mistake becomes visible. For absolutely everyone arguing that there is some true and knowable value is always, but always, arguing that it’s different from the one assigned to it in that market process, aren’t they?