GABS.WIKI

VALUE is the quality that makes a thing worth having. It is not a property of the thing itself, nor purely of the mind that beholds it, but arises in the traffic between them. An encyclopedia of value must therefore be, at its core, an encyclopedia of human regard.

Three meanings live inside the single English word. There is value as worth — the importance a thing holds in a life. There is value as price — the quantity of money, labor, or other goods it commands in exchange. And there is value as principle — the standards by which a person or culture orients itself. These meanings are cousins, not synonyms.

The Korean word 값 (gabs) collapses the first two into one syllable. A shopkeeper who asks 얼마입니까 — "how much is it?" — is asking for its 값. A philosopher who debates what a life is worth is debating 값. The tongue makes no distinction between the practical and the metaphysical, and this encyclopedia follows that instinct.

THE English value descends from the Latin valēre — to be strong, to be well, to be worth. The same root produced valor, valid, and prevail. To be valuable was first to be able; a thing's worth was its vigor, its capacity to hold its own.

The Korean 값 has older, quieter origins. It appears in the fifteenth-century Hunminjeongeum-era texts with the sense of price, worth, and recompense fully intact — one of those native Korean words (as opposed to Sino-Korean borrowings) that has carried the whole load of an idea for as long as the language has been written down.

What one tongue splits, another keeps whole. The native Korean 값, the Latin-descended value, the German Wert, the Arabic qīma — each is a small invention for handling the same stubborn problem: how do we compare unlike things?

PRICE is where two curves meet. The first records how much is offered for sale at each price; the second, how much is desired for purchase. The crossing is called equilibrium, a word the market itself has never heard of and rarely reaches.

The supply curve slopes upward: as the price a buyer will pay climbs, more sellers find the effort worth it. The demand curve slopes downward: as the price a seller will accept climbs, fewer buyers still want in. The crossing point is not a destiny; it is a gravitational center that the actual price orbits, pulled back whenever it wanders.

In reality the curves are not fixed. A fashion, a war, a rumor, a winter — each shifts one curve or both. The price moves. The market seeks a new center. This is the whole of microeconomics, and it is also a description of almost any romance, friendship, or negotiation in which two parties must agree on a number.

A LOAF of bread on a table in a city has passed through many hands. The wheat grew in a field; a farmer tended it; a mill ground it; a baker shaped it; a driver delivered it; a grocer arranged it; a cashier handed it over. At each step, a small margin of value was added, and a small fee extracted.

The chain is the linear story, but the truth is more like a net. A single lost link — a drought in Kansas, a strike at a port, a software outage at the distributor — can starve the final step. The value that arrives at the table is never the work of only the last pair of hands.

Adam Smith called this the division of labor, and marvelled that it produced more bread than any single baker could. Marx called it alienation, and warned that it hid the human effort inside the final price. Both were right.

NOT all markets are alike. A farmer's market, a stock exchange, a patent-protected medicine, and the state monopoly on your passport each operate under different rules of engagement. Economists sort them into four main classes, arranged by how much power any one seller holds.

Under perfect competition, many small sellers offer an identical good; no one has the leverage to raise a price without losing every customer. Under monopolistic competition, sellers differentiate through branding and feature — a small pricing island each. Under oligopoly, a handful of giants watch one another with the wary choreography of duelists. Under monopoly, one seller sets the price, and the only remaining question is how much the buyer needs the thing.

Real markets are mongrels. Smartphone manufacturing is an oligopoly with monopolistic-competitive skins. A city's taxi fleet may be a regulated quasi-monopoly competing with an oligopolistic rideshare duopoly. Textbook forms are a vocabulary, not a census.

A GLASS of water is worth nothing to a man standing in a river, and everything to a man dying in a desert. The good is the same; the value is not. This, very roughly, is the subjective theory of value.

For much of economic history the dominant view was objective: a thing's value came from the labor that had gone into it, or the cost of its materials, or some intrinsic utility. In the 1870s three men — Menger in Vienna, Jevons in England, Walras in Switzerland — independently overturned the idea. Value, they argued, lives only in the regard of a person in a particular moment, facing a particular choice. It is marginal: what matters is the worth of the next glass of water, not of water in general.

The implications are sweeping. If value is subjective, then a "fair price" is not a fact about the object; it is a provisional agreement between two regards. A painting that sold for nothing in 1890 and for ninety million in 2010 did not become more skilled in the interval. The world's regard for it moved.

This is not relativism. A person who would rather die of thirst than pay for water is not wrong about the value of water; he has merely measured it against something he values more. The encyclopedia records the measure without the moral.

THIS encyclopedia takes its name from the Korean 값 (romanized gabs, pronounced roughly gap). The word is native — not borrowed from Chinese — and appears in the earliest surviving Korean-script texts in exactly its modern sense: the price of a thing, the worth of an act, the cost of a choice.

The sound of the word is brief, almost blunt. A single syllable, ending in a consonant cluster that most tongues find difficult. It is not a pretty word. This is part of why we chose it. Value is not a pretty subject. It is the quiet mathematics underneath every meal shared, every hour worked, every sacrifice made. It deserves a name you can hear being said.

To ask 값이 얼마입니까? is, literally, "how much is the 값?" — how much is the worth? An encyclopedia that takes that question seriously, and refuses to answer too quickly, is the kind of reference we wanted and could not find. So we have tried to write it.

— The Editors