How much energy did it take to assemble this phone, to pull the materials out of the ground and shape them into that configuration?
Knowing the joules required to build something would give us a ratio-scale measure of the cost of production.
And it would be comparable across different countries and time periods.
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If it worked, this “true” price system would let us disentangle factors like inflation and subsidies from the physical cost of manufacture.
Big jumps would be due to something like the Haber process. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_pro…
So you might start with joule-based prices for already automated “steady state” manufacture of physical goods at scale.