I intend to seek analogies between social movement with physical movements, therefore, to compare the mechanics of social science with thermodynamics. I owe you some explanations on this design. There is need to establish a new science if analogies and relations that unite science are already established.
French jurist Maurice Hauriou (1899), Lessons on Social movement
If something has value in use it has the power to produce socially useful change. Shoes have the power to protect, the power to purchase and the power to be transformed into something entirely different. But the property that produces these physical changes is not a thing of air or metaphysics. I intend to show in the weeks and months ahead that value in use has a scientific explanation.
By “scientific” I mean two things. First, the explanation is falsifiable. The change theory of value is intended to be tested empirically. If my explanation of how value in use is created has no explanatory power, in the sense that the theory doesn’t match reality, I will be the first to reject it and return to the work. Second, the explanation is intended to be consistent and compatible with the fundamental principles of physics. More precisely, the second law of thermodynamics that explains why change occurs.
However, given that Maurice Hauriou, who first called for the unnamed new science over a century ago, and the writer were trained in law and not science, I’m mindful that lawyers proposing physics as the conceptual framework for understanding value in use sounds more like pseudoscience than science. A criticism forewarned by quantum chemist Edward Sanville:
The interchanging of words with precise scientific meanings, i.e. bond, energy, reaction, hot, etc., with their everyday meanings is one of the cornerstones of pseudoscience.
Haurio anticipated the critique when explaining in 1899 why a lawyer was so interested in physics:
It became necessary to study the thermodynamics. Not being a mathematician, I feared this study, but my work was greatly facilitated by the work of Henri Poincare which I wish to pay tribute to the uninitiated, that he is not only accessible, but bright. Taken together the principles of thermodynamics seemed to confirm my views rather than reverse, but it might perhaps suffice to mention that I was not sufficiently reasssured, but when I understood the principles of increasing entropy, I felt shocked… I ventured to see in thermodynamics “the science of behaviour of physical movements” and I made for the moral sciences or sciences of the conduct of social movements.
Preface to Lessons in Social Movements
Though he was far from alone.
At roughly the same time, economists were too reaching for the laws of physics to explain the newly reformulated exchange Value Problem . Since its emergence as an academic discipline, economics has spoken and dreamed of solving the problem of exchange value in the language of science. But the cornerstone of the neo-classical approach was not the the second law that had captured Hauriou’s imagination but the first law of physics.
Adam Smith famously defined exchange value in terms of “the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of [an] object conveys”. Whereas labour power and the act of work were fundamental to Karl Marx’s theory of exchange value. Indeed, economic historian Philip Mirowski goes one step further. Forcefully arguing that from the 1870’s the neoclassical economic theory of exchange value not only copied the nomenclature of physics but the underlying theory and mathematical tools of the new science:
The Marginalists appropriated the mathematical formalisms of mid-nineteenth century energy physics, which for convenience we shall refer to as “proto-energetics”, made them their own by changing the labels on the variables, and then trumpeted the triumph of a truly “scientific economics”. Utility became the analogue of potential energy; the budget constraint became the slightly altered analogue of kinetic energy; and the Marginalists Revolutionaries marched of to do battle with classical, Historicist and Marxian economics‟
Influential American economist Irving Fisher clearly illustrating the practice of taking physical concepts and translating them directly into economic concepts in Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices, and Appreciation and Interest:
It is no secret that Walras, Pareto and the founding fathers of general equilibrium theory were convinced that they had solved the problem of exchange value with the aid of thermodynamics. It is widely considered (Amir (1995), Costanza (1997), Mirakowski (1999) and Dousa and Dimingos (2005)) that the foundations of mainstream economics were a repurposing of the first law of thermodynamics and its mathematics.
If the neo-classical Value Problem is founded on the the idea that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, there should be no objection to lawyers drawing on the second law of thermodynamics to solve the pre-classical Value Problem of how we decide the best use of things.
Of course, words like “power”, “work” and “force” become scientific not because they are uttered by scientists rather than economists or lawyers, but because the claims, constructed out of those words, can be tested against our experience of the world without the need to first accept a doctrinal belief or an ideological assumption. Remembering that the validity of a scientific claim holds not because it’s true but because it has failed by shown to be untrue. In this sense, whether the economist’s theory of exchange value or the lawyer’s theory of value in use is valid depends (to some extent) on whether it’s possible to demonstrate errors in any premise or reasoning.
However, scientific does not have to mean econometric.
Mainstream economic theory is obsessed with math (Lawson (2006)) and no doubt there is nothing more seductive to the modern intellect than the beauty of mathematical proofs and statistics. Indeed, the best place to hide a lie from a lawyer is to let it loose in a data set and then wrap it in an equation . But it was not always this way. There are no sophisticated equations in the works of Smith, Ricardo or Marx. The classical economists did not make grand claims about the nature of exchange value by parsing data sets over-elaborate mathematical models. Likewise, you will find none of that here. Instead, I will draw on the old language of physics to explain value in use - the lexicon of observation. Comparing and analysing the relationship between things in terms of magnitude (more or less), speed (fast or slow), time (short or long) and possibility (can or can’t).
However, those hoping that the absence of mathematics will make for light reading might be disappointed. Whereas theories of exchange start off with a set of simple assumptions and quickly descends into complex formalism that is impenetrable without a mathematics degree, the opposite can be said about value in use. Understanding value in use is challenging to begin with and becomes easier over time. But not quickly.
The ancient Greeks had a word for solutions that suddenly and unexpectedly appear to provide an improbable answer to an insoluble problem - deus ex machina. Long before the clothing brand, Sophocles was dropping gods into his stories to suddenly resolve the plot. Likewise, there is deus ex machina quality to an unknown Australian lawyer craning in the the idea that a new science of value will somehow restore some order to social, political and environmental chaos. Seemingly as artificial and contrived a proposition as divine intervention in Euripides. To an incredulous audience, a thermodynamic explanation for value in use simply has no meaning and can do no good.
Why investigate “value in use” when the obvious (and popular) antidote to the well documented ills of shareholder value is to simply substitute one prefix for another that is more socially desirable and perfectly unobjectionable - shared value, sustainable value, system value etc.
The aim of the Millennia Challenge series is to answer this question and more. The heavy lifting of social change comes not from adding a new end state prefix, but in better understanding of the old constant state suffix - value in use - that takes us there. Each post in the series intended to give real meaning to value in use and its symbol - the Greek letter phi Φ. Associated in physics with the energy available to do useful work ( Chaisson 2001), phi or Φ denotes the potential value in use embodied in a thing that is available to do socially useful work.
Each post in this series will examine one element of value in use. By building from foundational theory, to basic concepts and then on to applied ideas that explain the production of value in use I hope to prove that far from being deus ex machina, the better answer to the best use of a thing has always been here (or at least since the time of Aristotle). And while you won’t need a complete understanding of value in use to understand the best use equation, you will require patience and a disciplined imagination.