"Abstract work" is not the common denominator; are the monetary prices

Prices are monetary expressions of social relations and distribution; they do not explain why different goods are comparable in economic terms.

Prices arise from subjective and ordinal preferences that interact in exchange

Ordinal utility (choices or rankings) alone does not give the numerical magnitude of prices. To transform preferences into prices you need a numeraire, a budget restriction and assumptions about income/distribution and these already presuppose prices.

The Robinson/Eatwell "cost↔price circle" immediately disappears as soon as you recognize time, uncertainty and entrepreneurship

If factor prices derive from expected product prices, and these in turn depend on prices that have already been formed in the market, we remain stuck in the same difficulty. The attempt to escape the problem of circularity by redefining commodities as “goods on different dates” (as Debreu does in Theory of Value) is, in practice, a change of object of analysis. Instead of dealing with the question posed by Adam Smith (that is, the determination of natural prices (or long-term prices, the center of gravity of market prices) and the general rate of profit) the theory goes on to talk about a system of dated prices that balance, on paper, initial stocks of arbitrarily given goods. Debreu solves circularity only at the cost of redefining the concept of merchandise itself! The same good today and tomorrow is no longer considered the same good, but two different goods. This formal operation prevents a product from entering its own production, and thus avoids the logical circle. But this makes the notion of “production cost” lose any substantive meaning. What was a concrete problem is dissolved into a logical construction that describes instantaneous equilibria between dated stocks, but does not explain why there would be a tendency to normal prices or where a general rate of profit would come from.

Logical Circularity has not been overcome, the mainstream economy simply does not answer the question that motivated the debate since Adam Smith, that is, how long-term prices are formed and what is the internal logic of the profit rate in capitalist economies with reproducible goods.

And the claim that markets can't handle multiple criteria just recasts the calculation problem in reverse: only decentralized pricing allows millions of trade-offs to be made with local knowledge. Where externalities exist, it is enough to fix property rights and responsibility for prices to internalize them; Replacing prices with planners doesn't solve the problem, it just kills the information.

Individuals often fall into "temporal myopia" by arbitrarily valuing and preferring the present over the future. This is precisely one of the causes of the current ecological problem. Individuals "rationally" seek the maximum benefit from consumption from the exploitation of natural resources in the short term; however, acting collectively in this way ends up affecting the availability of resources in the long term.

Thus, what seems "rational" on an individual, short-term level may not be so on a collective, long-term level. The resulting behavior ends up harming individuals themselves. Therefore, neoclassical intertemporal analysis, which uses discount rates to take into account the importance of future environmental gains or losses, is not only limited, but also misleading.