The madrasa operated a gift shop full of generic Ali Baba costumes made in India, targeted at the tourists that visited them in order to look at their building. The rather shamefaced guide ushered me out of this, following our conversation regarding the history of his insitution, into a workshop where, I was told, the madrasa students themselves made the Qur’an stands for their own use, enjoyment and exchange with other madrasas. The madrasa stands in a country seldom visited by Americans. I was funded by a university to go to there in order to research cultural monuments; I doubt I will ever return. I gave the equivalent of $11 for the object, in an exchange in which market value was not explicitly stated.

I offer this nicely complicated case study as fodder for a serious investigation of value. I would be unwilling to part with the object for less than 5 figures.

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/14/if-youre-a-libertarian-how-come-youre-so-mean/

In the particular case, the answer is actually 90 quid.

I disagree.

As JM would be the first to point out, every hour he spends threadjacking on blogs and detracting from the sum of human knowledge is an hour he could have spent working and giving the proceeds to the poor or, if that’s too much to ask, fixing broken links in Wikipedia or contributing to some similar project. But he prefers to be what he is. In the interests of learning about consequences, and since Chris hasn’t done it himself, I’ll advise JM that he is permanently banned from commenting on any thread of mine.

[haha, joke]

And actually, I think 36 is, in a slightly snidey way, asking a perfectly fair question – what is the balance that a ‘leftist’ should strike between participating in a market for cultural goods that is necessarily capitalist and individualist, and distributing their surplus income in line with their professed beliefs? if ‘champagne socialism’ is at one extreme an absurdity, and deliberately choosing to live in a rented bedsit so you can give 80% of your income to support the struggle might be equally absurd, what is the ‘sensible’ position? Is there one? Does it, can it, come down to personal choice, or is that not a whole lot different to simply reiterating a liberal-capitalist position that it’s their money to do as they please with?

Me too, especially among those who profess a leftist politics, and argue fo greater distribution of wealth. Whenever we buy a luxury or positional good we are,eschewing a painless, cost-free (to us) opportunity to redistribute wealth that could, in many circumstances, change the life of a person or family. What, I wonder, does that reveal?

I think the price is typically more like $500 – $1,000. Maybe Chris can enlighten us. I realise that that sort of money for a small piece of crockery may not strike a stockbrocker as very, very expensive, but that’s stockbrokers for you. If it did just cost 30 quid I suppose it is a bit different.

I think the subject of positional goods is fascinating in general, though.

In Poland, in pretty much every major city, if you dug randomly in the ground you were pretty much bound to find something from World War II. Mostly, as kids, we used to find various bullet casings but occasionally some kid would dig up a rusted up German or Soviet helmet or a piece of a rifle. Then we’d trade them amongst ourselves and the more unique stuff you could sell to folks who we knew collected these kinds of things.

There was also a fairly widespread media campaign, aimed at kids, about how if you find something that looked like it could be an unexploded bomb then you should go tell an adult, don’t touch it, and definitely not try to make it blow up. It was in comics, on tv, in schools, on posters, like those GI Joe “knowing is half the battle” and McGruff the Crime Dog “don’t take candy from strangers” ad campaigns.

Well, once when I was like 9 years ago we (me and a group of other boys my age) did find something that looked like an unexploded bomb. It was all covered in rust but it was vaguely oblong and had somethings at one end that looked like tail fins. We didn’t go tell an adult. We touched it and picked it up. And we definitely tried to make it explode. By climbing on top of a two story construction building and throwing it off a couple times. If you were a 9 year old boy what would you have done? Come on, honestly.

Of course the “bomb” didn’t explode and I don’t even remember what eventually happened to it. Some kid took it home with him or something.

But it just shows you how effective those ad campaigns really are.

Older books might be less obviously connected to the maker, but are so much more clearly connected to their past readers; thumbed pages give not just a visual but an immediate tactile (and olfactory) sense of their passage through time. No substitute, really, which is one reason the passing of interest in books these days is remarkable—weirdly, we’ll be returning eventually to a day in which well-bound books are specialty items.