… is from page 240 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2024 paper “Market Prices and Wages Do Not Reflect Ethical Value,” which is chapter 19 in The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions About Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy (Ryan A. Bourne, ed., 2024) (original emphases):
Prices and wages are important not because they reflect what an individual deserves, but because they provide information to producers about which products, services, skills, and attributes people are willing to give up some of their hard-earned labor to purchase. Prices aggregate information from myriad individual transactions, providing a signal and an incentive that shifts resources toward people’s needs and desires.
DBx: Prices also provide information to buyers about which products, services, skills, and attributes are more scarce relative to other products, services, skills, and attributes. This information also incites buyers to purchase less than they otherwise would of the more-scarce outputs, and to buy more than they otherwise would of the less-scarce outputs.
