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by rjbwork 1942 days ago
Like I said I really don't want to get into this here, but I really would suggest reading more into this stuff, as you do seem to me to have a number of misconceptions about LTV.
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Any pointers? I was under the impression that nobody besides socialists takes LTV serious anymore. And I gave some reasons why it doesn't make sense. I haven't heard any counterpoints that make me think investing more time into it would be worthwhile.

Edit: from Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value ) it seems quite a mess, perhaps a bit like planning economy where they add yet another equation to account for yet another problem, but they can never really capture it all. But at the end of the day, what is it useful for, other than making "worker demands"? Can you use it to compute anything useful? I highly doubt it. In another way it might just be saying "energy determines the price of everything", in archaic terms when energy was mostly "labor".

It seems much more practical and sensible to simply go with market prices.

Value != price, nor does LTV make said assertion. Things like markets and preferences (time, kind, etc.) help determine price. The assertion of LTV is that all value created is created by labor, as it is the transformative aspect provided by humans of the "Labor + Raw Goods + Means Of Production = Final Product" view of production.
Then as I suspected, it is just mumbo jumpo to allow people to make demands (I created the "value", so I deserve that thing).

Again my question, what is the actual use for the concept? If you can not use it to determine price, what is it for?

And there are still examples that show how useless it is, like an apple has no value because it grows by itself? But apple juice (or sugar extracted from apples) has more value than an apple, because labor is used to extract it from apples? What possible use could be for that metric (and what is the unit of "value" - a vague feeling that stuff is owed to you?)? Even though the nutritious value of an apple is higher than apple juice or sugar?