The General Theory of Capital: Self-Reproduction of Humans Through Increasing Meanings - страница 57

can be thought of as a kind of “algorithmic redundancy.” It’s a measure of how many extra bits we use to write s rather than s*, its shortest description. When we go from s down to s*, we squeeze out all that redundancy, leaving none in s*. That’s what makes it algorithmically random. … A program that could do perfect data compression—that could convert any string s into its minimal description s*—would be a very useful thing. But as we will see, such a program is impossible. … The problem here is that there is no program k that can compute algorithmic entropy. K(s) is an uncomputable function” (Schumacher 2015, pp. 241-7).

Since there is no algorithm that would reduce complex labor to simple labor, time cannot be a measure of abstract labor. However, different activities and their results can be reduced to a common equivalent, if not through the concept of time, then through the concept of cultural bits. Exchange value is measured not by the duration of time but by the amount of cultural bits contained in a set of use values. Use values are socially necessary existence values; exchange values is the socially necessary amount of cultural bits embodied in these values. Hereinafter, by value we mean exchange value in the context of use values, unless otherwise specified. Meanings became value as episodic exchange has turned into regular one, as small communities cohered into larger societies, as social necessity evolved.

According to the principle of least action, changes in the socially necessary multiplicity of existence values are linked to changes in the socially necessary mass of these values. We call this relationship between the set and the mass of existence meanings ordered by preferences the allocation of meanings. It takes activity to reproduce meaning, it takes meaning to reproduce activity. Value is the allocation of the only truly limited resource people have—their actions and results, that is, meanings—between competing goals. As an allocation of meanings, value has two sides: the side of benefits (meanings gained) and the side of costs (meanings expended). The socially necessary set and mass of meanings are determined not by some average but by the best alternative allocation that is foregone:

“In economics, the cost of an event is the highest-valued opportunity necessarily forsaken. The usefulness of the concept of cost is a logical implication of choice among available options. Only if no alternatives were possible or if amounts of all resources were available beyond everyone’s desires, so that all goods were free, would the concepts of cost and of choice be irrelevant” (Alchian 1968, p. 404).

The allocation problem and the choice problem are the same. The allocation problem implies choosing between counterfacts (benefits and costs), and the value is the best allocation to forego.

Philip Mirowski wrote that the transition from classical political economy with its “labor theory of value” to neoclassical economics with its concept of “marginal utility” is associated with the transition of physics from the concept of “substance” to the concept of “field” and with the penetration of mathematical methods into economic theory (cf. Mirowski 1989, pp. 176-7, 194-5). If classical political economy and neoclassical economics considered physics as a model, then the economics of the 21st century is guided for this purpose by the sciences of information, evolution, and complexity. The theory of marginal utility reduced value to the perception of utility by a person and did not take into account social necessity. This theory was unable to establish an objective measure of economic indicators, in particular, it could not measure utility and show how and why utility depends on social mores and ideals. The concept of value as a socially necessary multiplicity and mass of existence values is a generalization of two competing theories of value: the classical labor theory of value and the neoclassical theory of marginal utility.