“Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working?”

— Stewart Brand , book Whole Earth Discipline

Whole Earth Discipline (2009), page 277.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - t…" by Stewart Brand?

Stewart Brand 10

American writer 1938

Related quotes

“Separate wealth from value. All living things have value. We impart this value upon lifeless things to give them worth not vice versa.”

Lupe Fiasco (1982) rapper

Rules 2 Rule

“Every positive value has its price in negative terms… the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

“A person's worth is measured by the worth of what he values.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

“The social product grows from year to year. Who is now the true creator of this surplus value which grows wildly and beyond any measure? Who can afford to figure out the profit yielded causally adequate by this immense wealth and the series of economic miracles? In concrete terms: who is the legitimate distributor of the social product and who actually assesses the shares in practical life? As long as the issue is about value, all such questions must above all be formulated as economic questions.”

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

"The Tyranny of Values" (1967)

“On account of his extensive charities, scholars from Iraq, Khorasan and Mawaraun-Nahar started presenting themselves in his court and Islam was spread. He held in great regard Sayyid Muhammad who was a very great scholar of the time, and strived to destroy the idols and temples of the infidels. He got demolished the famous temple of Mahadeva at Bahrare. The temple was dug out from its foundations and the hole (that remained) reached the water level. Another temple at Jagdar was also demolished' Raja Alamadat had got a big temple constructed at Sinpur. He had come to know from astrologers that after 11 hundred years a king by the name of Sikandar would get the temple destroyed and the idol of Utarid, which was in it, broken. He got this [forecast] inscribed on a copper plate which was kept in a box and buried under the temple. The inscription came up when the temple was destroyed [by Sikandar]'….. The value of currency had come down, because Sultan Sikandar had got idols of gold, silver and copper broken and turned into coins.”

Sikandar Butshikan

Tabqat-i-Akhari, (also known as Tabqat-i-Akbar Shahi, Tabqat-i-Akbari, Tarikh-i-Nizami) by Khwajah Nizamud-Din Ahmad bin Muhammad Muqim al-Harbi, Translated from the Hindi version by S.A.A. Rizvi included in Uttar Taimur Kalina Bharata, Aligarh 1959, Vol. II. p. 515-17, In Goel, S.R. Hindu Temples - What happened to them