"Value" and Wealth

Logically, it seems it would be pretty hard to have an idea of what "Wealth" really is without understanding what "Value" is, since "Wealth" is something like accumulated value.

Adam Smith had a very radical and progressive idea for his time (and actually still) to define Value (and hence wealth) as productively used labor.  Marx followed Adam Smith in this (Smith, Ricardo, and Marx are sometimes considered the most well known "Classical" economists), and Marx invented the term "Labor Power" to refer to productively used labor.

One problem with a theory like this is that it makes all "labor power" a thing, regardless of whether that labor power is employed in destructive ways, which it most often is.

Neoclassical economists, the dominant modern school, and along with Keynesians and others, abandoned the radical Labor Theory of Value and replaced it with a different radical but equally (if not more) flawed idea, that value is determined subjectively by how much people want things.  This is the central concept (so central it's hardly ever talked about) in all of modern Economics, and it enabled modern economics to be a highly mathematical system.  If you want a technical term, it's "Hedonic Value."  It's an assumption rather than a "theory" as such.  Using this and a bunch of other terribly flawed ideas, Neoclassical Economics is then able to portray Capitalism as something like the best of all possible worlds, and anything that deviates from "Market" principles as wrongheaded at best and likely disasterous, when in many cases the reverse is true.

There are huge normative considerations in making such definitions of value.  No system of economics can be truly free of asserted "human values."  Any such definition may elevate the importance of one or another group of people.  You might think the "labor theory of value" has a pro-worker orientation, and it certainly does in the hands of Marx.  Smith tends to see things more from the vantage of employers and the "Nation" as a whole.  Meanwhile "Hedonic Value" would seem to impart a pro-Consumer orientation, but probably more like a pro-Corporate orientation, because Corporations have the power both the make things desirable (wanted), and the power to make things selectively available to those who pay for them.

I'll just quickly list some of the problems with Hedonic Value.  First it barely distinguishes between "wants" and "needs" and therefore tends to overlook the truly needy and elevate the whims of the rich.  Secondly it overlooks the fact that desires are not entirely, or in most cases very much, endogenous.  Desires are for the most part manufactured by social processes (typically Corporations, sometimes Governments), so desires are themselves social products.   So ultimately Hedonic value is circular, with the end point NOT being maximum satisfaction, but rather maximum profit and maximum empire.  Satisfaction as such may itself fall down a hole of infinite regress, as ordinary people find their lives more precarious, worked to death and hardly enough time to turn on the TV or Internet to get more Desires, while the world itself is regressing into hell.

Though economic elites may be fine with this kind of theory, primarily because of profit maximization, it is in fact a violation of the most deeply principles that are truly conservative, likc conservation.

Which gets to the biggest problem of all.  It ignores the stocks and flows of the natural world itself.  The natural world is reduced to sources and sinks that merely serve the satisfaction of desire maximization of profit in the here and now, the future of those sources and sinks (and their potential future uses to society) be damned.

A more conservationist view would human production as a process of deforming and degrading natural resources so that they have no future.  Thus, human production leads to lesser value and wealth, not greater.  In using natural resources in any unsustainable fashion (which is most of what we do with them) we are borrowing if not stealing from the future, theirs and ours (presuming we have a future, which is at best very uncertain now, largely thanks to human production).