> There is 0 value given to the experience of visiting a natural space or to forests which take thousands of years to grow which quite literally could not be reconstructed for any amount of money (for example) ... we need something more at a philosophical level from economics than we are getting.
This is a different kind of problem than you think. It's not that we don't value it, it's that the value is diffuse. Every person in the area values the forest an average of $100, there are a million people in the area, therefore the value of the forest "should" be a hundred million dollars.
The problem is that the government has to fill a budget hole and there is a logging company that would pay ten million dollars to log the forest. The government could also get the same money by reducing the defense budget, or replacing some government employees with less expensive contractors, or replacing corporate income tax with VAT so international corporations have to pay their taxes, but all of those groups have better lobbyists than the public at large. So the public (and the forest) loses.
But the problem wasn't that we couldn't calculate the value, it was that knowingly destroying ninety million dollars in value in order to have ten million somewhere else is a thing that happens when you have a collective action problem like that, because the value destroyed is spread across a million people and none of them have enough incentive or power as an individual to stand up and stop it.
So the problem isn't the valuation, it's how do we solve the collective action problem?
You allow that there exists some metric capable of capturing the diffuse value — so — why not bake that diffuse value into the monetary system and ensure that it must be paid for the transaction to legally occur? That’s why I’m proposing a second dimension in the pricing model. To tear down the forest — you have to compensate the collective for the externality you are 'taking' from the diffusely benefiting party ... that “payment” to the collective is a real-world transaction that has to happen as part of the rules for legal transactions and the payment has to be tendered in units of this second dimension of the pricing model which approximates the 'diffuse value' of the resource. This 2nd dimension of price is distinct from the value realizable by some possible private owner and is conceptually proportional to that which is being “taken away” from the commons by the removal of the forest ...
I’m not sure exactly what the rules for this shared resource currency would look like but I think there is room in the design space to integrate the shared resources available to humanity into a pricing model that would be more explicit and coherent than what we have now. I'm imagining a monetary system which includes a diffuse resource value for all resources -- with transaction rules updated so that trade/consumption became a two dimensional exchange involving two private parties, and the diffuse account. For the transaction to be legal, it must preserve the 'value' of the world's 'diffusely owned resources' either by not consuming anything or by the issuance of a 'debit' from the defuse balance of one of the parties (no creditor for that -- it just disappears, but the point is that the party has to have sufficient diffuse value credit to be able to destroy the required amount of diffuse value) ... I think the design space of rules governing production/inflation/transactions of diffuse value units could yield a lot of flexibility for helping to encourage that actuarial optimization over the transaction space be likely to efficiently produce broadly meaningful uses for resources -- perhaps more so than the setup we have now ...
The greedy could still act in their own self interest but would by design be more constrained in how they harm the rest of us and the relative amounts of harm of different practices would be more easily discernible as part of the public record and understanding ...
The issue is there isn't really a second dimension there -- it's all value that can be measured in money. There is a number of dollars at which it actually does make sense to log the forest. The problem is that the government allows it happen for much less than that amount.
Setting explicit prices may help in theory, but there are two major problems. The first is that the price is inherently subjective. There are no market transactions to look at to see what "forest continues to exist" is currently trading for. It's the existing state and self-perpetuates without anybody having to do or pay anything until such time as someone actively expends resources to change it. So at best you're speculating, and choosing the wrong value -- whether too low or too high -- is costly. Too low and we haven't solved the existing problem, too high and we can't have a transportation system because no one can mine steel to build trains or cars or ships. So accuracy matters, but accuracy is expensive. Getting the valuation right is a detail-oriented labor-intensive process.
And in theory we already have this. It's supposed to be the job of our representatives in the legislature to do this. Which brings us to the second problem, which is that because the value is subjective, we still have the collective action problem. The logging company lobbies to have the value of the forest set low, the diffuse general public doesn't strongly object, and we're back to square one.
One of the strong options to solve at least some of this is to require all budgetary issues to be put up for public referendum. Not just "entire government budget, yea or nay" but at the line item level. The government proposes to sell the forest to the logging company for ten million dollars, yea or nay? Then the public votes nay and the legislature has to come up with the money some other way.
Naturally that isn't very popular with lobbyists because then the public tends to vote down the harmful but politically expedient revenue generation methods, so there is always strong lobbying pressure not to do things like that, and we're back to the collective action problem. It also has the general direct democracy problem of people not having enough time to evaluate issues carefully, but in principle there shouldn't have to be that many different or complex revenue generation methods. The existing tax code is unnecessarily complex and people could plausibly make time to understand a much simpler one -- which would also remove a large number of the existing harmful carve outs for groups with strong lobbyists.
This is a different kind of problem than you think. It's not that we don't value it, it's that the value is diffuse. Every person in the area values the forest an average of $100, there are a million people in the area, therefore the value of the forest "should" be a hundred million dollars.
The problem is that the government has to fill a budget hole and there is a logging company that would pay ten million dollars to log the forest. The government could also get the same money by reducing the defense budget, or replacing some government employees with less expensive contractors, or replacing corporate income tax with VAT so international corporations have to pay their taxes, but all of those groups have better lobbyists than the public at large. So the public (and the forest) loses.
But the problem wasn't that we couldn't calculate the value, it was that knowingly destroying ninety million dollars in value in order to have ten million somewhere else is a thing that happens when you have a collective action problem like that, because the value destroyed is spread across a million people and none of them have enough incentive or power as an individual to stand up and stop it.
So the problem isn't the valuation, it's how do we solve the collective action problem?