Thread by @balajis

I’ve often thought that the most fundamental way to price things might be in joules.

How much energy did it take to assemble this phone, to pull the materials out of the ground and shape them into that configuration?

Imagine something like this, but tracked for every product over time.

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.
answers.google.com/answers/thread…

Conceptual precedents for this include MIT’s Billion Prices Project and the Kardashev scale.

If it worked, this “true” price system would let us disentangle factors like inflation and subsidies from the physical cost of manufacture.

Also, if it cost 1000 joules to produce something in 1950s America but 100 joules today, you could get into the guts of the manufacturing to find the exact spot where the improvement occurred.

Big jumps would be due to something like the Haber process. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_pro…

The trickiest part may be pricing human labor. Two people may both consume a sandwich’s worth of energy, but have different skills.

So you might start with joule-based prices for already automated “steady state” manufacture of physical goods at scale.