---
type: claim
id: doubly-unstable-value-prices-and-relevance-shift-independently
title: "The value of products and technologies is doubly unstable because market prices fluctuate AND the underlying relevance of knowledge shifts with the technological landscape"
status: published
confidence: likely
description: "The Phaistos disk — printing invented 2500 years before Gutenberg — shows context determines value independently of the innovation itself"
domain: mechanisms
importance: null
source: "Hidalgo 2015 Why Information Grows; Diamond 1997 Guns Germs and Steel; Mandelbrot 2004 The Misbehavior of Markets"
created: 2026-04-21
related:
  - products-are-crystals-of-imagination-embodying-knowledge-beyond-creators
  - self-organized-criticality-markets-tune-to-critical-state
  - autovitatic-innovation-self-organizing-systems-destroy-own-fixed-points
tags:
  - value-theory
  - complexity
  - knowledge
  - markets
---

The value of any product, technology, or body of knowledge is unstable in two independent dimensions that compound each other.

The first layer of instability is well-known: market prices fluctuate. Mandelbrot demonstrated that these fluctuations follow power-law distributions, not bell curves — meaning large price movements are far more common than standard models predict. This is the instability that traders, risk managers, and central bankers grapple with daily.

The second layer is deeper and less recognized: the UNDERLYING RELEVANCE of products and knowledge shifts as the broader technological and social landscape changes. Copper was essential in the Bronze Age, nearly worthless in the medieval period, and essential again after Faraday, Edison, and Westinghouse created the electrical industry. The change was not in copper's physical properties — those remained constant — but in what humans knew how to DO with it. The value of copper is not intrinsic to copper; it is a function of the surrounding knowledge landscape.

The Phaistos disk is the most striking example. Someone on Crete in 1700 BC invented printing — pressing 45 distinct stamps into clay, 2,500 years before Gutenberg. The technology produced no revolution because the complementary knowledge did not exist: no paper (clay is bulky), no metallurgy for cast movable type, no screw presses, no oil-based inks, no alphabetic script (the Cretan syllabary required too many character forms), and no mass literacy to create demand. The SAME invention had negligible value in 1700 BC and civilization-transforming value in 1455 AD. Nothing changed about the invention. Everything changed about its context.

This means equilibrium-based conceptions of value are structurally inadequate. If both the market price AND the underlying relevance of what is being priced can shift independently and dramatically, then there is no stable anchor point from which to assess value in isolation. Value is irreducibly contextual — dependent on what other knowledge exists, what complementary products are available, and what social conditions prevail.

The practical consequence for investment: the value of a technology today is not a function of its current utility but of the trajectory of the knowledge landscape around it. A technology that is useless today can become invaluable when complementary capabilities emerge. This is what makes stepping-stone technologies investable even when they appear to have limited immediate application.
