What is something truly worth?
Not what it sells for today.
Not what the market whispers in numbers.
But beneath fluctuation — beneath preference, scarcity, and time —
is there such a thing as absolute value?
Economists from the classical age searched for an answer that could hold steady,
an anchor in the current of exchange.
They sought not just a unit of trade,
but a standard of truth —
an invariable measure of value,
immune to distortion, indifferent to desire.
And yet, the deeper they looked,
the more they found value to be a moving target —
dancing between labor and price, use and want,
between the ideal of essence and the reality of exchange.
This is the story of absolute value, exchangeable value, and the longing for something fixed
in a world that never is.
Absolute Value: The Dream of Stability
To speak of absolute value is to ask:
Is there a way to measure worth in itself,
not relative to other things, not shaped by fleeting needs or fashions?
It is a question of essence:
Is there a value that a good contains —
intrinsic, permanent, independent of the market?
Philosophers have long asked this of beauty, justice, goodness.
Ricardo and his peers asked it of commodities.
Could labor be that essence?
The total toil embedded in a product —
a coat, a bushel of wheat, a hammer —
could this represent some stable inner worth?
But then came the problem:
Labor itself varies.
Skilled, unskilled. Productive, idle. Seasonal, rushed.
And even if effort is constant, its social utility shifts.
So even the measure of effort
could not hold as a measure of absolute value.
Exchangeable Value: Price in the Flow
If absolute value eludes us, we fall back on exchangeable value —
what something can be traded for in the market,
how many shirts for a shovel,
how many coins for a candle.
This is value in relation —
shaped by supply, demand, proximity, scarcity, even perception.
It’s fluid. Responsive.
Honest, in a way, because it reflects what people are willing to do —
not what they ought to value, but what they actually value now.
But exchangeable value is also fragile.
It can be distorted by monopoly, fashion, fear.
It can reward the trivial and ignore the essential.
It changes not just across borders, but across hours.
In exchangeable value, there is no center —
only movement.
It tells us much,
but it tells us nothing lasting.
The Invariable Standard: A Philosopher’s Compass
So classical economists, especially Ricardo, sought a third thing:
an invariable standard of value.
Something not subject to market shifts.
Something that would measure value as a ruler measures length.
But how to build such a measure?
If gold and silver fluctuate, if labor varies, if money changes in purchasing power —
what remains?
Ricardo proposed using a commodity produced with constant quantities of unchanging labor —
a kind of theoretical ideal,
a ghostly product untouched by productivity or innovation.
It was a brilliant failure.
Because such a commodity did not exist.
And yet, the attempt mattered.
Because it revealed a truth we still wrestle with:
We need standards not to cage reality, but to make meaning inside it.
We need ways to compare, to trace, to know when something is being taken or given fairly.
An invariable standard of value is not a thing to find.
It is a moral need.
Why It Still Matters
Today, the search continues.
Inflation-adjusted prices.
Purchasing power parity.
Cost-of-living indexes.
Real wages.
Basket-of-goods comparisons.
All of these are attempts to find consistency
in the swirl of trade and toil.
Because behind every price is a person.
And behind every exchange is the silent question:
Is this fair?
We may never agree on absolute value.
Markets will always fluctuate.
But the human need for reference, for justice, for dignity within transaction —
that remains.
The Whisper Beneath the Market
Maybe Ricardo never found his standard
because he was looking in economics for something that lives in ethics.
Value is not just what a thing can fetch.
It is also what it costs the soul to make,
what it means to the one who holds it,
what it does to the world it passes through.
An invariable standard might not be a commodity.
It might be a question we carry forward:
Does this trade preserve dignity?
Does this exchange reflect effort?
Does this price hide someone’s exhaustion or pain?
From corn to labor, from market to moral longing,
the journey through absolute and exchangeable value is a journey through ourselves.
And while we may never measure worth without flaw,
we can still choose to weigh it with care.
Because the truest standard may not be invariable at all —
but it is this:
Never forget the life behind the price.