Law of Equivalent Trade

I think that the idea from FMA is pretty shallow in itself. It states that something of a certain VALUE must be given up to gain something else of an equal VALUE. Yet, how does one go about determining this VALUE? The Value of things is not a universal standard. Value itself can be based on several different things such as emotions, monetary value, historical importance, etc. For every person, the value of certain things amounts to something else and the whole idea of value becomes relative. If this is the case, then every character in FMA must have their own approach to alchemy. Not everyone needs to give up the same things to gain something else. Then, there must be a huge number of ways in which to gain the same thing. Hence the equivalence of two things also becomes a relative property. Then how does one look at equivalence in the universal scheme of things.

(I can't believe i just brought relativity into the whole thing! What am i doing in this thread anyways??)

Well, I thought I might as well add my thoughts to this discussion. It's been a while since I've seen FMA, so please bear with me if I get my facts about the show mixed up.

It seems to me that FMA deals with the Law of Equivalent Trade as a scientific principle relating to alchemy. It doesn't seem to me as though they try to extend it beyond alchemy to a Law governing all of life. They do try to brave the tricky business of assigning value to human life, however. This is a daunting task indeed, and perhaps should be left for a different discussion altogether.

However, you asked for examples from personal experience, so I shall oblige you. Let me go back to your tennis example. You are equating the time and effort you put in practicing to the acquired skill you gain at the end. It is commonly known that I don't have very good coordination. Gym class was the bane of my existence in highschool, especially when we were graded on our accuracy. I remember this unit we did on volleyball, where the test at the end required serving the ball into a hula hoop laid out on the floor on the opposite side of the net. Volleyball is a sport I really enjoy, so I was determined that I was going to do well on this test. I practiced for hours. I practiced tons more than the other kids, putting in way more time and effort. In the end, there were those who achieved better scores with much less effort than I. It's not equivalent. I had to give up far more than the others to gain the same amount.

Splash made especially good remarks about why value cannot be measured, too. Value is an abstract concept, an invention of the human mind. It's not like physical properties such as mass and density. Without humans, there would be no value, because it only exists in our mind. Thus, we can change the value of things at will. In such an environment, equivalent trade cannot exist as a law.

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Originally Posted by KitKat

I had to give up far more than the others to gain the same amount.

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Whoa.....that line definitely reminds me of a point they've tried to make near the end of FMA.
I think with Lyra and the baby....

Sort of like the rock lee/neji situation. Lee practiced far more, and worked many times harder and still could not defeat neji, simply because neji was born with an advantage.

I can't decide myself if it exists or not.

1. Today at the tournament, I lost in the preliminaries to a small indian kid about 2 years younger than me, and about 2 feet shorter than me. I'm sure i've worked many more hours and sweat much more than he has, yet I still lost. Where is the equivalency in that?

2. The equivalency might not be per individual, but maybe per clan. Although I've worked much harder than he has, his family was able to afford professional coaches and indoor courts so that he could get better easier. The equivalency is that his parents work to gain that money reflected on their kid who got the benefit of it, while being lower middle class myself had no coaches and just played hours and hours of tennis trying very hard to get better.

So I think that equivalency exists, even if not for 1 individual, it happens per groups. If you put work into something, maybe you won't acheive much from it, but someone close to you will.

=/

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Originally Posted by Mizuchi

Sort of like the rock lee/neji situation. Lee practiced far more, and worked many times harder and still could not defeat neji, simply because neji was born with an advantage.

I can't decide myself if it exists or not.

1. Today at the tournament, I lost in the preliminaries to a small indian kid about 2 years younger than me, and about 2 feet shorter than me. I'm sure i've worked many more hours and sweat much more than he has, yet I still lost. Where is the equivalency in that?

2. The equivalency might not be per individual, but maybe per clan. Although I've worked much harder than he has, his family was able to afford professional coaches and indoor courts so that he could get better easier. The equivalency is that his parents work to gain that money reflected on their kid who got the benefit of it, while being lower middle class myself had no coaches and just played hours and hours of tennis trying very hard to get better.

So I think that equivalency exists, even if not for 1 individual, it happens per groups. If you put work into something, maybe you won't acheive much from it, but someone close to you will.

=/

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very true. The amount of work it will take to achieve something differs from person to person. It seems, however, that almost anything that one person can do, can be achieved by others depending on how much effort is put into it.

you're ridiculous........

are you compromising that a little kid countered your hard work at training for tennis by his parent's hard work in the business world?

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Originally Posted by Mizuchi

Sort of like the rock lee/neji situation. Lee practiced far more, and worked many times harder and still could not defeat neji, simply because neji was born with an advantage.

1. Today at the tournament, I lost in the preliminaries to a small indian kid about 2 years younger than me, and about 2 feet shorter than me. I'm sure i've worked many more hours and sweat much more than he has, yet I still lost. Where is the equivalency in that?

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Do you have any proof that this indian kid hasn't actually practiced more than you?
Also, Neji is also a damn hard worker.

I am an awful role-model.
I didn't do an ounce of revision for my GCSE exams, and yet I came out of them with good enough grades to get into a pretty swish college.
I certainly don't beleive that I put in enough work to earn those result, but I got them anyway by virtue of my being able to think logically, while other people who worked their backsides off revising came out with poor grades.

On the other hand, I used to work for a government contractor, on a contract from the UK Hydrographic Office. My collegues and I put 110% into the contract, and as a reward for our efforts, we found ourselves out of work when we'd finished the contract.

Equivalent trade does exist in the world, but generally, it's subsumed by principal of acquisition.
It's more preferable to get something for nothing, than it is to get something through equivalent trade.

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Originally Posted by Terracosmo

Do you have any proof that this indian kid hasn't actually practiced more than you?
Also, Neji is also a damn hard worker.

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No solid proof, but he did have many friends in the stands cheering for him every time he did sumthing really bad or really good. I on the other hand haven't hung out with my friends for months so i could spend most of my day on tennis.

Im not saying he didn't work hard (comparing to neji)
Im just saying I worked a lot harder but with less effects (comparing to lee)

@Mizuchi: You have no idea what this kid did, you only know that he had a lot of support at the match. Here's some pure speculation on the situation....His friends could have been his family. Indian's (if he was even Indian) tend to have large families that are close knit so maybe a bunch of his cousins came to support him.

And as to you losing...you lost. I assume that you are a competnet Tennis player and not just some shmuck who picked up a racket. Therefore countless tiny situations all conspired togeather to make you lose, he just hit the ball somewhere you couldn't get to it more than you could. Some of that is skill and some of it is luck, but there are no grounds for you to think that somehow all your preparations should guarantee the outcome you desire, regardless of how much he may or may not have practiced.

To bring this back into the Equivalent Exchange principle you could have still gotten something from the match even though you didn't get what you wanted (a victory). If you learned something new then that is the fruit of your effort. If all you gained was bitterness and an emo outlook on Indian kids who are better than you at tennis then that is what you gained. While the idea of value is pretty much bogus in a universal sense, the rule that every action has a reaction tends to apply beyond the realm of physics. You worked and practiced and played a match, and now you are different than before you played the match, maybe you aren't a Tennis champion now, but all of your experiances combine to shape you into who you are, that is the exchange.

Although there is lots of discussion about exchange, the point of this is whether Equivalent Exchange exists. Most things in this world have a certain cost associated with them. Often that cost will be our basis of evaluation as to whether we want to attain that thing. Maybe being good at tennis seems like a goal worth your time and effort to you, but as for me, I wouldn't be caught dead practicing that much for a sport I find so boring. Other things have consequences, sometimes that we don't expect, which can be a cost we didn't take into consideration. Perhaps with all the time you spent practicing tennis, your friends stopped inviting you to social events. This is a consequence you probably wouldn't have anticipated at the beginning. And then there is a principle of sacrifice, where we willingly give up something in order to have a chance at gaining something else. This doesn't always work out, and sometimes our sacrifices can be in vain. There is no doubt that these things exist. We've seen them all in our lives.

Equivalent Exchange, as was mentioned above, requires an absolute and universal value to be assigned to everything. How can you tell if the exchange is equivalent? Well, you can't! The exchanges we make are very often not equivalent. To give a very superficial example, you might pay $20 for a pizza from a new pizza place and find out that their pizza is disgusting, when you could have had a $10 pizza that's a lot better from the place you usually order from. And believe me, it's a lot easier to try to assign value to something like a pizza than to something like a friendship. If you still think equivalent exchange exists, re-read splash's discussion of value. Unless you can dispute that, you will not be able to lay any grounds for the existence of Equivalent Exchange.

Well I didn't want to get involved with this but I'll offer my opinion. I will have to disagree with you, Kitkat; there is no need to refute splash's ideas of value. If value was absolute it would negate equivalent exchange, but rather relative value is what makes it plausible. Your pizza example is a great example of relative value. When you bought the pizza it was in your value worth $20, to the pizza maker it was also worth $20 thus an exchange is made. However, then you had an experience, eating the pizza, which changed your value of the pizza. You now value the pizza at $10 so you won't pay $20 for it again.

Now I am not saying equivalent exchange is fact as it is poorly defined in this argument. If you limit equivalent exchange to micro events then I can make arguments for both sides, if you define it in a broad macro series of events then it gets vague and everything becomes speculation. For example, if I define equivalent exchange as being limited to one event and that event must be equal then I could argue that if I gave a homeless person $20 then that $20 is more valuable to them then it is to me. If I define it in that the sum of all events that occur will be equal then I could say that my grandfather came over to America and worked real hard which in turn my father had to work a little less and I in turn even less, while say that random homeless person's grandfather came over and didn't work as hard and so his father had to in turn work a little harder and so on. It is based on belief and will vary as the definition. Just as if you were to ask everyone if God exists, well say maybe 50% say yes, then as your definition of God changes so does opinions. Basically what I am saying is it is useless! :)

I'm not sure if I completely understand what you're saying Apraxhren. Do you think you could clarify? Are you saying that because value is relative that the value of each event becomes the value that will balance things and and make everything equivalent?

I see your point about looking at things in a micro sense and a macro sense though. There are a lot of events which lead to or influence other events which may be unknown. I did an activity once, where we were given a scenario of a family living in a developing country, and we had to write on a paper all the root causes of poverty. In the end, we had a giant paper covered in a web of interconnected events and factors, and it was doubtful that we managed to identify every factor that contributed to the situation. To look at Equivalent Exchange in a truly macro sense, well, that would require being able to evaluate the entirety of the human race over all of time. Certainly not a task we could accomplish.

I think though, from what I'm hearing from Mizuchi's posts, he's referring to a more discrete and micro-oriented sense of Equivalent Exchange.

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I'm not sure if I completely understand what you're saying Apraxhren. Do you think you could clarify? Are you saying that because value is relative that the value of each event becomes the value that will balance things and and make everything equivalent?

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In a way, that is an argument one could use who was trying to prove that equivalent trade is a fact. I was commenting on the part when you said equivalent exchange requires an absolute value assigned to everything. I was merely trying to say that equivalent exchange could possibly exist without absolute values, in line with splash's relative value post.

Well, I guess you could say that, but it complicates things in that each object or event has an infinite possibility of values it could be, and at any one time, it may have multiple values simultaneously. How do you equate something that at any point in time exists in several or even infinitely many different states?

While I'm not an expert, I beleive Richard Feynman suggested something along those lines.
We only experience the most likely state.

It is actually more than possible for the value of something to exist in around 6.8 billion states.
I have a cafetierre on my desk.
To me, it's pretty valuable; it allows me to prepare good coffee for myself, makes the room smell nice, and is something that is mine.
To you, well, you probably couldn't care less about the cafetierre. It doesn't get you coffee, it doesn't make your rom smell nice, and it certainly isn't yours (mine!).
The only value it could plausibly hold for you is related to the effect it has on me (I'm a better person for having my coffee), but it the long run, I could smash it to bits and you wouldn't feel any sense of loss.

You would probably be happy to exchange my cafetierre for a peice of lint, and consider it a fair exchange, because it had no value to you to begin with. Whereas I would not.

Thye moral of this story is that I like my cafetierre.

Hmm.....

Heres my thoughts on the subject!:eek: Use your goddamned common sense to judge the value of something! Equivalent exchange obviously exists because you can't tell me you've never had an experience involving it. But with people everywhere tring to make money, equivalent exchange is rarly seen nowadays.

Theres absolutly no point in asking if it exists or not. We all know it does. ("Sometimes")

My two cents.................

But........I'll let you guys get on with your disccusion. =P

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Originally Posted by Lucifus

But with people everywhere tring to make money, equivalent exchange is rarly seen nowadays.

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But, in the case of buying something, the item has an asking price.
If the item isn't worth the asking price to you, in any way, then you wouldn't buy it. Thus, skewed as it may seem, this is equivalence.

You might buy it if you need it, or if you think you need it. You might pay several times more than what it costs to preoduce the item, especially in a tightly controlled market.

For instance, some people really love birds. Such a person might convince herself that she "needs" a parrot after seeing one in a pet store. After deciding what kind of parrot she wants, she shops around and finds that the lowest price available is a few hundred dollars. She pays this amount for a young parrot whose feathers have not fully come in yet. After taking home the bird she can't figure out why he keeps on singing spanish lullabies.

The distributor who sold that parrot to the pet store goes to the Costa Rican Rain forest every year. In the Spring time the native people who still live in the forest (yes, they're still there) climb trees and snatch baby birds from the nests. These hatchling are taken home and the women of the tribe take care of the birds along with the children, often singing them lullabies in Spanish and Portuguese. When the distributor comes in the Fall he trades for the young birds. The native people can recieve a knife, a bell, or even a cord of fabric for each bird.

The distributor then takes the birds back to the US. He slips the customs agent a hundred dollar bill, and sells each bird for three hundred to seven hundred dollards. The woman who bought that bird had no idea that her bird only cost the distributor a twelve dollar knife. If she ever found out she wouldn't consider it equivalent anymore.

So, this boils down to us not being deep enough to understand Mizuchi's advanced layer of thinking?