Saturday, December 4, 2010

"flourishing metric"

In the previous post I suggested that what I called a "flourishing metric" be used to compare when something is over or under valued in the market outside of the value or price set by supply and demand forces in the market. I realized that one way to do with may be to work off of Martha Nussdaum's "capabilities approach" which is built on original Sen's idea. Both Nussbaum and Sen are influenced by the Aristotelian notion of flourishing.

So I decided to look up Nussbaum's capabilities approach to refresh my memory after having been years since I've read her "Frontiers of Justice." Nussbaum has a open list of ten or so "capabilities" that defines human flourishing. I wikied "capabilities approach" and it turns out that economists are actively trying to obtain such a metric.

Perhaps things like housing can be assessed to their objective quantifiable value based on the contribution they contribute to flourishing or, relatedly, our "capabilities". Any value over and above that value may be construed as over evaluation (such as due to greedy profiteering, etc)