Working definition. Value is what makes one possibility matter more than another. It can name economic worth, practical usefulness, moral importance, cultural meaning, or the principle by which a choice is judged.
Inherited meaning
Economics often approaches value through exchange, utility, scarcity, and price. Ethics asks what is good or worth pursuing; art and culture ask why some forms remain meaningful beyond their market. These traditions overlap, but price is never an exhaustive account of value.
Meaning in the imagination economy
When the cost of producing competent artifacts approaches zero, value does not disappear—it relocates. It gathers around the quality of the intention, the originality of the possibility, the judgment used to select it, and the human change the result can sustain. The imagination economy is therefore not an economy of more content. It is an economy of choosing what deserves reality.
What changes in practice
Before measuring output, state what kind of value the work should create, for whom, and over what horizon. Separate what is easy to count from what is important to protect. Ask who captures the benefit and who carries the cost.