What is the value of conversation? This doesn’t appear to be a question that allows for a simple answer. For those who insist on simplification, one can certainly and easily find sufficient platitudes to serve as satisfactory responses. Expressions like “good conversations are priceless” or “conversations have incalculable value” might well fit into philosopher Daniel Dennett’s concept of “deepities”—a term I often reference. As a reminder, a deepity is a statement that contains a factual and trivial truth that appears profound, but whose true meaning is absent or diffuse. Let’s attempt to deepen our understanding beyond such superficial characterizations and explore conversation as both an economic and existential phenomenon.
The speculation that a good conversation can be so valuable and so rich that no number can quantify its worth is easily accepted. Nevertheless, let’s not be satisfied with such a hypothesis and instead explore what this means. The perception that it’s impossible to quantify the value of a conversation may be due to conversation’s intangible nature. Conversations are real but impalpable, like many other phenomena of human experience. A humanist phenomenologist would say that such phenomena are precisely what constitute human experience. A materialist would obviously disagree.
This tension between the tangible and intangible aspects of conversation echoes what philosopher Martin Buber described as the difference between “I-It” and “I-Thou” relationships. When we approach conversation as an “I-It” interaction, we reduce it to its instrumental value—what we can extract, quantify, or measure. But in Buber’s “I-Thou” framework, conversation becomes an encounter between genuine presences where meaning emerges not from extraction but from relation itself. This distinction helps us understand why some conversations feel deeply significant despite producing no measurable outcome.
There are conversations that change people’s lives, both for better and worse. There are conversations that reveal “gold mines” of money to be hoarded. There are conversations that bring ruin—financial and otherwise—to those who participate in them. Notice how I’ve mixed different dimensions that might indicate paths to quantifying the value of conversations. In some cases, I used purely subjective and intangible criteria, such as “changing lives.” In others, I pointed to “gold mines” and “financial ruin,” which can more easily be measured and quantified.
value vs. cost: a dialectical relationship
It’s important to distinguish “value” from “cost” for the sake of clarity. Not having sufficient training or experience in economics-related areas, I acknowledge the likely risk of inaccuracies. However, armed with dictionaries and a careful, fleeting use of a large language model, I’ll venture the following distinction. “Cost” represents the amount paid to acquire a good or service. It’s objective and measurable, and therefore can be easily calculated. “Value” relates to the perception of utility and relevance, to the perceived benefits of something. For these reasons, calculating value is more complex.
This distinction isn’t merely academic—it reveals a fundamental dialectic between cost and value that shapes how we experience conversation. Cost represents the measurable, quantifiable dimension that organizations and individuals can track and optimize. Value represents the qualitative, experiential dimension that often escapes measurement but constitutes the essence of meaningful exchange. These concepts exist in productive tension with each other—each incomplete without the other, yet frequently at odds.
