[Mud-Dev] Broken currencies

[Timothy Dang]

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Brian 'Psychochild' Green wrote:
> Matt Mihaly wrote:
> > On Tue, 3 Apr 2001, Brian 'Psychochild' Green wrote:

>>> A basic tenet of economics is that value is determined by utility
>>> and scarcity.
 
>> Not to split hairs but value is not so neatly defined.
 
> Yeah, and not everything is a frictionless vacuum as college level
> physics would have us believe.  This is a basic definition.  It
> works well enough to explain what's happening, at least on a basic
> level, in our games.

Or as my wife (a physicist) says, "Assume a spherical cow..."

On the other hand, the term "value" can easily be misleading because
it reflects a common attitude towards things, which economists don't
like to use. We've discarded a lot of commonly used economic notions
because they're difficult or apparently unscientific, or
whatever. Some of these I think we've discarded improperly. But
"value" I think we were right to toss.

So, as far as we're concerned, things don't have a "value". They have
a price. The price is determined by many things, perceptions,
scaricity, market institutions. But while "value" is normally
interpreted as being a characteristic of the object in question,
"price" is just a number which describes what it takes to trade the
object.

Of course, this puts us into a major bind when we try to deal with
things which don't have prices. O, well.

------------------------------
Timothy O'Neill Dang / Cretog8
520-884-7261
One monkey don't stop no show.

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