alt Hacker News> We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties precisely because of the time embedded in them
Lost me in paragraph three. We pay for those things because they're recognizable status symbols, not because they took a long time to make. It took my grandmother a long time to knit the sweater I'm wearing, but its market value is probably close to zero.
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I would say that wearing a sweater knitted by one's grandmother is its own kind of status symbol. I'm more impressed by that (someone having a grandmother willing to invest that much effort in a gift for them) than someone spending $1000 on an item of clothing.
The fact that those items took a long time to make is part of what makes them status symbols though, because if you pay a lot of money for something that took no time to make at all (see most NFTs) you look like an idiot to a lot of people.
Yes, Veblen goods, and there are examples of cloning Hermès bags for example (still by hand) where they're much cheaper yet took the same amount of time to create.
Reads like a feel good article to signal virtue and feel validated in the wake of the Delve scandal. But ultimately obvious, opportunistic, and mid.
Maybe the analogy was wrong but more and more, I believe that some of a value was implicitly about how many organs/industries did it touch.
I feel you, I guess i succeeded in not being lost and keep reading by solving the conendrum in telling myself: it certainly should take time to grow the cows for the bags. Nonetheless I'm glad i finished reading it, it was a good essay.