We Rank What Matters Most
This is part 2 of answering the question: How do we make decisions in the real world?
One Takeaway
Every choice you make reflects what you value most in that moment, but how much more you value one thing over another can’t be measured because it can always change.
Choices Reveal Our Priorities
When you make a choice—what to eat, how to spend your evening, where to invest your time—you’re doing more than picking an option. You’re revealing your internal ranking of preferences at that moment.
Some economists call this a value scale: a mental ordering of what matters most to you, based on what you believe will improve your situation.
Let’s say you spend your Saturday night at a concert instead of watching Netflix or attending a friend’s game night. That decision tells us the concert was your top priority at that moment. But here’s the key: we can’t measure how much more you valued it than the other options.
There’s no scale to say the concert brought you “three times more happiness” than staying home. All we can know is the choice revealed your highest-ranked option at that time.
Why Value Can’t Be Measured
Value exists only in the mind. You can rank your preferences—A over B over C—but you can’t assign them objective scores. You might love chocolate ice cream more than vanilla, but you can’t say it gives you “6.3 more units of joy.” That kind of precision doesn’t exist outside of spreadsheets and simulations.
What’s more, we can’t compare value between people. If Jack spends his morning running and Jill spends hers reading, we can’t say one is “better off” than the other. Each acted according to their own value scale, shaped by their unique goals, preferences, and experiences.
How Preferences Shift
Value scales aren’t fixed. They shift constantly in response to new information, changing tastes, or environments.
If you find out the concert’s headliner canceled, maybe Netflix jumps to the top.
If your neighbor adds a last-minute guest to game night, that might change your plans again.
If your priorities shift—say, you’re feeling sick or a surprise bill pops up—your value scale adjusts with them.
This ability to change is what makes human behavior so dynamic, and why it’s so hard (impossible) to predict perfectly.
Why This Matters for Policy and Planning
If everyone has different and changing value scales, then efforts to “maximize well-being” through one-size-fits-all policies are bound to fall short. Whether it’s banning a product “for our own good” or setting rigid standards for how we live, these approaches ignore a basic truth: only individuals can truly know what matters to them.
Trying to engineer happiness from the outside misses the point. Well-being isn’t something that can be handed down. It’s discovered through personal trade-offs and lived experience.
The Bottom Line
Our choices reveal what we value most in the moment—not in numbers, but in rank. That ranking changes as life changes. Understanding this encourages empathy and a deeper appreciation for the many ways people go after happiness and satisfaction.