Moving beyond "Reputation"--the Market View of Reality

[Ken Brown]

Tim May wrote:

[...]

> >
> > We're not disagreeing. By a "single" value I meant a universally
> > agreed upon value.
> 
> If there is a "universally agreed upon value" for something, and someone
> values it differently, is it still "universal"?
> 
> Nope.
> 
> What there may be are market-clearing prices, in various markets and at
> various times, but this has nothing to do with "universally agreed-upon
> values."


Tim got it right here. The market value of anything is not a universally
agreed price, it is any price at which a buyer and a seller can agree to
do business.

All the discussion about certificates of speaking Navajo or whatever are
slightly beside the point. If personal reputation, as such, has a market
value it isn't the money you'd get by selling the reputation, because as
everyone else already pointed out, if you could sell it, it wouldn't
really be a reputation. The market value of a personal reputation is the
extra money you could get by selling something else, backed by that
reputation.

That sort of reputation is used in real markets every day. I need to get
the hot water boiler in my flat fixed. I would be prepared to pay more
money to a plumber with whatever certificates of plumberhood plumbers
have than I would to someone I just happened to meet down the pub. I
might be happy to spend even more on someone who had done good work for
friends of mine. That sort of reputation has cash value.

It is even more important in pseudo-markets, like the ones in board
memberships of large corporations, or in public offices in the gift of
elected politicians. The kind of people who are called, in England, "The
Great and the Good" - an odd mixture of retired businessmen who have
made enough money, politicians who know they will never get to the top,
academics looking to increase their public profile, and the well-meaning
offspring of rich  and respectable families. Such people sit on
committees, and boards, and commissions, and inquiries, they run 
charities, and schools, and hospitals, and can make a career out of
nothing but reputation. Famous for not even being famous any more. Over
here in Britain we get them worse than  you Americans do do (though you
get them pretty bad, if the list of achievements of the board members of
a couple of US companies I have shares in is anything to go by) - we
have institutonalised it as the House of Lords. Yuck.

Ken Brown