@Vismay, this seems to be a commodities exchange.
- magic convertor. Given the usual (but that need close scrutiny!) assumptions of unhindered competition and reasonably available information, this is simply the the job of any commodity market. Market operators know what makes commodities useful, and have ideas as to how such usefulness will evolve in the future. driving demand. Market interaction aggregate all their ideas into an equilibrium price, that, in neoclassical economics, is equivalent to the marginal value of that commodity into the economy.
- stocks. Stock exchanges exchange stocks. Human labor is not stockpilable as a raw material (it is when you incorporate it into an artifact: a craftsman puts a month of her time in building a grand piano). Nor is it transportable. Moving labor around en masse is what Polanyi called “dislocation”, and had Very Bad Effects in the late 19th-early 20th centuries. By the way, @jolwalton knows much about this stuff: check out this post. Anyway, it is very tricky to trade it through a stock exchange.
- brand. That’s one of the cruces of the matter. In order to make intellectual sense, neoclassical economics assumes that preferences are exogenous. Demand for steel or iPhones is “out there”, and companies serve it. Once you introduce the ability for companies to create desires, they operate both on the demand and on the supply side of the market. Equilibria vanish, as both sides of the market push to sell more and more. Equilibrium price lose meaning.
Are you sure? It seems to me that humans have started innovating millennia before capitalism showed up, and never stopped developing new technologies. And it’s not just me. Mariana Mazzucato has written a definitive reality check on “private innovation”. It contains the famous slide of the iPhone, showing how everything that makes the iPhone smart was invented in public labs, by taxpayer-funded researchers. The Internet; the GPS; the touch screen; the world wide web, and so on. And Eric von Hippel has shown that the majority of product innovation is done by ordinary people, mostly non-professionals. An incredible 6-10% of the population of the six countries he surveyed engage in some kind of innovation!
Have you read it? I did not finish, but it reminds me of the stuff I dabbled in at UCL in 1994-1995. That was an intellectual dead end…