Well, I mean, you can certainly say economic value doesn't capture all of the value. But you can also say that there are metrics of value that do capture everything. Thermodynamic entropy, for example - its steady march to zero is statistically unstoppable. You can't measure a child's economic value without making a lot of assumptions, but you can measure a child's thermodynamic heat production with a few simple experiments. It might sound a little out there, but I've been looking at the maximum entropy production principle and some books on thermodynamics, and there really is a lot that is applicable to calculations about human systems. Viewing humans as dissipative structures designed to maximize entropy production really explains a lot about how the world works. Notably, some questions about our energy usage patterns. AI may not be useful economically yet, but it's excellent at dissipating heat.
In fact entropy is relative to what we define as chaos vs what we define as ordered. When we can't explain the order, we define it as being chaotic, and for convenience we model it statistically in stead of in absolute terms. I learned that few months ago from a HN posted article.
