The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

by Mariana Mazzucato

For some economic schools of thought, the price of products resulted from supply and demand, but the value of those products derived from the amount of work that was needed to produce things, the ways in which technological and organizational changes were affecting work, and the relations between capital and labour. Later, this emphasis on ‘objective’ conditions of production, technology and power relationships was replaced by concepts of scarcity and the ‘preferences’ of economic actors: the amount of work supplied is determined by workers’ preference for leisure over earning a higher amount of money. Value, in other words, became subjective.