The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward paints Dorian Gray and Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton. Dorian is fascinated with Lord Henry’s hedonistic view of beauty for beauty’s sake.

Dorian decides to meet up with Lord Henry, but the latter is late as is his fashion. Eventually he arrives.

“So sorry I am late, Dorian. I went to look after a piece of old brocade in Wardour Street and had to bargain for hours for it. Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” [1]

The weather or a brocade; a portrait, beauty, or pleasure; what is the value?

Economically, value could broadly be divided into two categories: Use-Value and Exchange-Value. Use-value is something that satisfies wants or needs, and exchange-value is the market price. The two go hand-in-hand but often do not see eye-to-eye. [2]

Take the weather and the environment, for example. In Riane Eisler’s work The Real Wealth of Nations, a spin on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, she states:

We are now measuring the wrong things. Consider GDP and GNP. These measures would actually be funny if the consequences weren’t so serious. These measures of ‘economic health’ actually place activities that harm and take life (like making cigarettes, and the resultant medical bills and funeral bills from smoking) as part of productivity. In the same way, oil spills are great for GDP (the cleanup costs, the lawsuits, etc.), and so are the production of weapons and the medical and funeral costs from when they are used. All these add to GDP and GNP.

But not only do these conventional economic measures put negatives on the plus side; they give absolutely no economic value to the life-sustaining activities of the household economy and the natural economy (in poor countries often the fundamental and direct preconditions for survival). So an old stand of trees is only included in GDP when it’s cut down, whereas the fact that we need trees to breathe and circulate our water is ignored. Similarly, the caring and caregiving work performed in households is given no value whatsoever, and economists speak of parents who do not hold outside jobs as ‘economically inactive,’ even though they often work from dawn to late at night. [3]

Apparently what people need for survival, as well as beauty and art, are secondary or tertiary matters, and life is mere economic reduction. The price is known, but value is not.

This is not to condone Dorian Gray or Lord Henry’s “vanity”, nor to condemn; but rather it is to recognize the wants and needs often overshadowed by exchanges.

There is still beauty in some shape or form, a value without price. It is covered in the skies, buried underground, and hidden in the heart. It is tomorrow and in 100 years.

[1] The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ch. 4. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/174/174-h/174-h.htm#chap04

[2] “Use value”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value

[3] The Real Wealth of Nations. https://rianeeisler.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Real-Wealth-Of-Nations-Eisler.pdf