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I was sitting here shopping online this morning when I came to the startling realization that I have no idea how much anything is actually worth. I guess I understand the idea that something’s worth is pretty much determined by what a person is willing to give up to attain it, or that I ultimately decide whether an item is worth its asking price by whether or not I am willing to pay it, but I don’t know if that’s good enough for me.

For instance, let’s say a gallon of milk costs $2.50. I pay the $2.50 because I need the milk and because it’s about the same price everywhere I go. But I have no idea if it’s actually worth that amount of money.

Some things are harder to assign value to than others. Your average car, for instance, isn’t really THAT hard to appraise. It takes a certain dollar value’s worth of materials and labor to make the car, advertisting to let you know it exists, freight costs to get it to you, and some markup for the dealer and the manufacturer and probably fifty people in between to make some profit from it. [Note: this does not apply to cars that are made exactly like other cars, but have a fancy name attached and as such cost three times as much for almost the exact same thing.]

But then you have something like a CD or a DVD or a video game or a painting, a product made marketable by the creativity of one or hundreds of people, their work, their time, but only a very small and inexpensive amount of material. Is a new Xbox game really worth $50? If you have a game like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that took two years, hundreds of people, and probably upwards of $10 million to produce, or a game like Ikaruga for the Gamecube that obviously had a much smaller development team and much lower development costs, but both cost the same $50, how are you supposed to figure out if one or both or neither is actually worth that much?

I’m sorry; this post probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, since I technically answered my own question at the beginning. I guess I’m just not satisfied with the answer.