different kinds of value-numerical value, truth value, cash value, moral value, aesthetic value? Professional economists today are by and large content to ignore the issue of the origins of value, and to treat it, the way eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientists treated matter, as if it were given, irreducible, indestructible, and without internal articulation. If pressed, most economists would now define value as marginal utility, which means, roughly, usefulness relative to the cost of other objects. But what makes an object useful? It is surely not merely its efficiency in doing what it is designed to do, but also how desirable is the goal of its design. Useful for what? Is not desire-which can make something valuable-itself valuable, and a possession that can be justly reserved for its begetters or inventors? A brand name can be sold for millions of dollars; surely what is being sold is to a large extent the pure substance of desire. John Hicks's big book Value and Capital does indeed struggle with the issue of why people desire what they desire, but concludes that value is essentially just what his colleagues assumed--naturally recognized and sought by human beings, an elaboration of natural drives.' But the enormous gap between our physical needs and the extraordinary things that people buy shows us that the natural drive theory is either plain wrong or so tautologous as to be useless. It is no good being morally upset by this gap; it is the way things are, and indeed is the other side of the coin of the glorious idea that humankind does not live by bread alone. Furthermore, desires change radically. The great French historian Fernand Braudel traces the rise and fall of the desire for spices, sugar, cocoa-desires so fierce they could create and topple empires, and yet which in a century or two fade into the oblivion of a mild acceptability. New desires and hence new values arise, conceived