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Futurity: negotiability of debt (pg. 390-400) first thoughts

Commons spends a lot of time thinking about the double meaning of many words and how we use them.  One of those words he is concerned with is "commodity" (page 393, IE).  He talks about the meaning of a commodity as a physical object and secondly as the ownership of a physical thing.  Commons claim that the classical economists had an inherent contradiction in their work because they used both of these definitions. Commons spends some time in the first part of the chapter "Futurity" thinking about the various ways we can classify a commodity. He uses the example of water (pg. 399-400). He states that the Austrian economist Bohm-Bawerk classified water in four ways: 1. as a physical object, 2. as having some chemical or physical qualities 3. as having some value to humans (use-value) and 4. as having attached to it legal rights and duties.  Commons goes on to state that engineering and engineering economics is focused on number 2, hedonistic or psychological econom...