User:Frog postulator/sandbox

In the philosophy of economics, the frog-postulation paradox is a question about the economic value of purely mental activity.

John Maynard Keynes posed the question in 1933 as to whether it was possible to ascribe any economic value to mental activity. The example he gave was whether merely sitting in a college room and thinking about an object such as a frog was an action with an economic value -- Keynes thought not, expressing himself robustly and rather sarcastically about "frog-postulation".

It was Alfred North Whitehead who responded later by observing that Keynes himself had been paid, and no small amount, to sit in a college room and think, not about a frog, but about a man thinking about a frog -- an activity even less likely to have an economic value in Keynes's original argument. Whitehead thought this a paradox, if not a contradiction in Keynes's argument, and termed it the frog pustulation paradox.

Modern commentators resolve the paradox in two ways. Firstly, they point out that Keynes confused, perhaps for polemic purposes, the concepts of being of zero economic value ("worthless") and not being amenable to valuation in purely economic terms ("priceless".