The Value of Pearls
' Pearls are valuable not because people dive in to collect them. It's because pearls are valuable that people dive in for them. ' Some people consider it an incontestable argument against the labour theory of value. How do you view it ? As I see it, the argument is silly and outright fallacious. Its fallacy consists in mistaking pearls as ' valuable ' things before men have discovered them. But ' value is an emergent property, not an essence ', says Paul Krugman, a Nobelist economist, and a marginal-utility theorist. Therefore, pearls inside uncaught oysters' bodies can't be ' valuable '. It's only those pearls collected from oysters fished out of water by people that are ' valuable '. The reason is simple. Pearls collected thus cost you a lot of labour : the toil of travelling from your home to the sea, the toil and trouble of finding oysters with pearls, the cost of journey ( i.e. bus fare, train fare,etc for using these vehicles during your journey ) which means the expenditure of your hard-earned money ( product of your hard labour ), etc. People dive in for pearls because diving in for pearls is ' valuable ' , i.e. a lucrative trade, like fishing seas for fishes, keeping snakes for venom, poultry farming for eggs and meat, dairy farming, etc. None of pearls, fishes, snakes' venom, poultry eggs, etc are ' valuable ' in themselves.
Do you endorse this argumentation as the right refutation of the quoted argument ?
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