I’m not sure I see the point of you telling me that you have sex with your wife. We are talking about aligning value and meaning.
Edit: since I’m rate limited now and I don’t really intend to come back to this discussion later, I’ll leave my reply to you here and leave it at that:
Okay, but you could have done that without bringing your personal sex life into the discussion.
Either way, that you have sex with your wife doesn’t say anything about the alignment or misalignment of value and meaning in capitalist societies. It’s perfectly possible for you to have meaningful sex with your wife, and for that to not be encouraged by capitalism as a valuable activity. In fact, in America there’s an issue with birthrates because younger generations cannot afford families, healthcare and education, but we make sure they can get cheap loans for cars and TVs are affordable. That’s the misalignment I’m talking about.
Have a good one and please leave your personal sex life out of future comments. I’m sure you can find another relatable way to frame your point.
The point is to demonstrate a clear and relatable example of something the vast majority of humans doing without making a buck off of it. In fact, people will spend money to do it where it is legal.
It's unclear to me why you think economics should be about aligning value and worker meaning at all.
Another way to think about it is that the capitalist system does a great job of aligning value and meaning, just on the consumer side and not the producer side. Compensation is based on what meaning someone else finds in your work and will pay you for it. It seems rather silly to have a system where workers are compensated for work they find meaningful but no one else does.
Capitalist systems also don't have a great way of measuring value that doesn't include a monetary exchange. For example - if I fix my neighbor's computer, and he gives me a dozen eggs from his chickens, we've exchanged tangible value (we've both benefitted from the exchange), but under a capitalist system, the value of that exchange was unmeasurable (since no money changed hands). You could convert it to a market rate analysis, but that mostly never happens.
Similarly, if a parent stays at home and takes care of the kids - that's economic value. But it will only show up in the statistics if the parent takes care of someone else's kids and hires someone to take care of their own (since that's economic exchange).
One trend of capitalism was taking a lot of this "implicit" or off-balance-sheet value creation and making it explicit.
You are mixing up having a monetary system and having a capitalist system, and I don't see how it relates to the topic.
You also said that capitalism is bad at measuring off balance sheet value creation, and then say a fundamental trend of capitalism is to take off balance value and make it explicit. Which is it and why do you think it's a problem?
Why does it matter if capitalism doesn't put a price on a mother raising her own child? You seem to imply that a better economic system should put a price on this activity. Why? Should someone be paying a parent or raising their own child, and who?
One aspect of capitalism is that an individuals get to choose what they value and pay for it. Why should I pay mother to raise her child without choice?
If for some reason I found value in her raising her child or mine, there is nothing in a capitalist system that stops me from setting up price and paying them to do it
Capitalism is a model and framework for economic interaction. It says nothing about what people enjoy and find meaningful.