Other labor theory of values had been proposed before Marx, but Marx developed it into a consistent and rigorous form. It was (and should now still be) obvious to even liberals that value is created through labor. How that works, in what amounts, and how that value is imbued and made useful in an economy are things that Marx developed entirely differently to his predecessors
Most people play games these days and talk about things being overpriced. I like to use this as a way of explaining value.
Why is the product overpriced? What measure is the person using when looking at a skin you can buy in a videogame to assess its value?
They know people will pay this price, and that it’s being priced at the maximum amount efficient for highest profit. But what makes them FEEL that it is overpriced?
Because the price is considerably higher than its value. The method of feeling out the value that human beings use is based on how much labour they think went into the product, proportional to the size of the audience that it is being sold to of course.
I like to use this internal feeling of value to get people to realise that they’re using this theory themselves internally without realising it.
Other gave good responses, but here are two papers which test the Marxian Labor Theory of Value with contemporary economic data if you are interested:
Zachariah, Dave. Labour Value and Equalisation of Profit Rates: A Multi-Country Study.
Tsoulfidis, Lefteris, and Dimitris Paitaridis. “Chapter 8 On the Labor Theory of Value: Statistical Artefacts or Regularities?” Research in Political Economy, edited by Paul Zarembka, vol. 25, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 209–32, https://doi.org/10.1108/S0161-7230(2009)0000025011.
The bibliography of the first paper also has a lot of related reading.
Umm wasn’t ‘the labour theory of value’ an artifact of contemporary liberal economic orthodoxy
Other labor theory of values had been proposed before Marx, but Marx developed it into a consistent and rigorous form. It was (and should now still be) obvious to even liberals that value is created through labor. How that works, in what amounts, and how that value is imbued and made useful in an economy are things that Marx developed entirely differently to his predecessors
Most people play games these days and talk about things being overpriced. I like to use this as a way of explaining value.
Why is the product overpriced? What measure is the person using when looking at a skin you can buy in a videogame to assess its value?
They know people will pay this price, and that it’s being priced at the maximum amount efficient for highest profit. But what makes them FEEL that it is overpriced?
Because the price is considerably higher than its value. The method of feeling out the value that human beings use is based on how much labour they think went into the product, proportional to the size of the audience that it is being sold to of course.
I like to use this internal feeling of value to get people to realise that they’re using this theory themselves internally without realising it.
Other gave good responses, but here are two papers which test the Marxian Labor Theory of Value with contemporary economic data if you are interested:
Zachariah, Dave. Labour Value and Equalisation of Profit Rates: A Multi-Country Study.
Tsoulfidis, Lefteris, and Dimitris Paitaridis. “Chapter 8 On the Labor Theory of Value: Statistical Artefacts or Regularities?” Research in Political Economy, edited by Paul Zarembka, vol. 25, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 209–32, https://doi.org/10.1108/S0161-7230(2009)0000025011.
The bibliography of the first paper also has a lot of related reading.