Value Beyond Money

Discussions center on whether true value is limited to monetary or market-based measures, arguing for intrinsic, personal, social, and non-economic forms of value creation independent of financial gain.

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Keywords

EDIT e.g E.g HN value money economic inherent meaningful worth labour created price valuable

Sample Comments

Invictus0 Apr 16, 2021 View on HN

Value doesn't have to be money. You can be nice to someone and that adds value to the world and counts as value creation. If all you do is suck value out of the world then I would argue you are a bad human being.

toddh Jan 16, 2014 View on HN

Value is never created, it is a human construct assigned by humans to something for a variety of reasons. It isn't tied to work or any type of currency. So "commenting on HN, tweeting, reading about other companies" can indeed have value if humans deem it having a value.

gnulinux May 31, 2022 View on HN

Claims like this are in general not well-founded. There is no objective way to determine the value of a thing outside of the economy. If there were, and if it were meaningful such that $ value converges to the "real value" economy would be a trivial game. So, really what you propose cannot exist.

kerkeslager May 9, 2019 View on HN

Just because something doesn't make anyone money doesn't mean it doesn't have value.

1over137 Jan 3, 2025 View on HN

Things can have value without the need to bring money into the equation.

seec May 28, 2025 View on HN

Yep that's pretty much it.If it was all about value, we wouldn't have people doing "work" who not only don't generate any material wealth but actually consume a lot of value for nothing very valuable in return.

motters Jan 27, 2012 View on HN

The end goal of work isn't money, it's to produce something of value. Money is just a technology for trading things of value.

raymondh Jun 2, 2013 View on HN

The author's point is that "valuable" isn't the same as "valued by others who are willing to pay you", and that the latter can interfere with the former.

thelastinuit Mar 4, 2021 View on HN

Spot on! I'm looking forward for the day money/value will based on not only on what you provide/create but also on how much that impacts all the connected things to make that happen.

Hammershaft Jul 15, 2022 View on HN

Is it useless if it has value to the creator?