Sure. Hyperbolic example: a starving orphan and a king are both looking for dinner. The orphan has no money -- therefore, the economic value of feeding the orphan is zero. The king, of course, is loaded, and pays an enormous premium for tiny asymptotic improvements in perceived quality because he can. The market value of chasing those asymptotic improvements is enormous.

Would you say that the value of feeding the orphan is zero?

Would you say that the value of chasing those asymptotic improvements is enormous?

Key observation: the market notion of value is very different from what people would colloquially agree is valuable.

Economists would say this is obvious. In one sense, it is -- we've all seen it in a million (hopefully) less-extreme incarnations. However, if you were to watch these economists closely, within 60 seconds of claiming it was obvious, they would kick out an argument that fudges the distinction between the economic notion of value and, well, value (the colloquial notion of value should really need no qualifier -- I applied one above simply to highlight that it had been hijacked).

That's the bit to pay attention to: substituting the concept of "economic value" for "value." This innocent-sounding approximation is actually a trojan horse containing extreme laissez-faire assumptions. With a mere slip of the tongue, they invite you (or you invite yourself!) to assume the conclusion of any economic rationalization, cloaking whatever cockeyed scheme the markets have cooked up today in a veil of artificial legitimacy.

Anyway, the day I plugged this into my worldview and forcibly separated the concept of economic value from the concept of value, something interesting happened. I previously had two competing views of the economy:

1. Gee, it sure seems to always act as a mercenary for the rich and powerful an awful lot.

2. It is a tool for revealing, weighing, subdividing, balancing, and reconciling collective preferences, both directly and transitively.

Before I separated the notion of "economic value" from the notion of "value" in my head, I was willing to accept that perhaps the hierarchies and mercenary behavior of #1 were merely emergent properties of an optimization process that truly did maximize value per #2. (Note -- I said "value," not "economic value." Did you catch that?) I saw this as a deeply legitimizing factor for economics in general, especially because I was keenly aware of failures in the colloquial definition of value (it's really bad at transitivity, for instance).

After I separated the notion of "economic value" from the notion of "value" in my head, I realized that the weighing factor made the optimization process of #2 equivalent to the mercenary process of #1. If a few people have all the money, then "weighing collective preferences" just means doing what those people want. To the degree that's currently the case, the optimization process is a silly ruse. It's a continuum, though. If everyone has some money, everyone gets represented in the decision making. If a large group of people -- say, "the middle class" -- has all the money, their collective interests will be well represented, but those on the bottom get drowned out. "Economic value" begins to diverge from "value." If a few people have all the money, they are the only ones who decide what's (economically) valuable, preferences of everyone else be damned. "Economic value" diverges completely from "value." In short, the divergence between what's valuable and what's economically valuable is proportional to the level of inequality.

The subtle nastiness of this situation is that the system runs away. You start with market forces that truly do represent the collective will of the people but as the wealth starts to concentrate more and more, the weighing factor increasingly disregards the voices on the bottom and pays more attention to those on top. Stocks go up, jobs disappear, rent increases, wages stagnate, poverty skyrockets -- apply the weighing factor and you see that none of these are bugs. They are all features. The predictive capability of our worldview has increased.

There is hope, though. Chaos is the enemy of skewed wealth distributions, of consolidated power, and ultimately of this divergence between value & economic value. There are exponentially more ways for wealth to be mixed than for it to be concentrated, so any kind of chaos can make it happen. Capitalism is anti-fragile -- it degenerates into feudal exploitative nastiness if you leave it alone, but if you stir the pot once in a while it truly is the marvel that economists paint it to be. How to do that? Well, in the happy case the chaos comes from growth. In the sad case, it comes from violence. Here's hoping the next big upset comes soon and from growth, rather than stagnation and eventual violence.