Interesting. What would you say of the psychological need to "create" scarcity as a way of instilling meaning, and giving people something to compete over?
I speak as somebody who just found my favourite PS1 game on ebay, for $500. Apparently, its a cult classic and a collectors item.
To me, this implies that some degree of scarcity will always re-establish itself, through our own capacity for boredom. I'm curious what you think.
Thank you :) Today my son found, somewhere in depths of my old toolboxes, a small metal plate with an eagle and "born to ride" inscription - something I took from my first serious motorcycle. It's objective value is about zero, but it is unique and valuable in non-monetary terms. Valuable only to me.
Cult classics are similar in that sense - items that have meaning to only some people, but those chosen few will gladly give $500 for the item that many other people would consider, well, rubbish. Soo... the scarcity I had in mind was simple matter of stuff that is necessary to live (water, food, shelter), but has no special meaning on its own. Oh, it can, of course:
https://www.mostluxuriouslist.com/top-10-expensive-bottled-waters-world/
but that water is not expensive because o scarcity - it is expensive because of uniqueness. To me it's not quite the same thing, uniqueness is scarcity in some respect, but it has slightly different tone - scarcity is about things you need, and uniqueness about the things you want. I preemptively agree that the boundary there can be blurred sometimes :) And I also think you are totally right, people will inevitably find something to give value to... because psychology. Maybe because in our culture we're taught to never be satisfied, it would be counterproductive to our economic system... :) And even if/when we have molecular duplicators, and we can copy Mona Lisa atom by atom, and we had exact copies of the painting, they will be worth $100. The original will remain exactly as expensive as it is now.
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Interesting about the Mona Lisa and duplicators. I'd never run that thought experiment but I suspect you are right: the original might even increase in value, after suddenly being the "one and true original" among a sea of replicas.
I think in both of our cases, (PS1 game and motorcycle memorabilia) what people are ultimately paying for is the nostalgia. It's basically placebo: you are willing to pay whatever price is necessary to convince yourself to experience a nostalgic rush. In such cases, both originality, and high resource sacrifice/unobtainability, work positively to make this all believable.
How weird?
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