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The Manhattan Beads Mystery
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The Manhattan Beads Mystery
Topics:
Steve Keen considers the following as important:
This could be interesting, too:
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| The Manhattan Beads Mystery |
I think, the price reflects, how little they knew, how little the effort was, to produce such things.
That's the problem of markets: you must guess, how much effort it took others, to produce a thing. This makes fraud very possible. And it is fraud and seen as fraud, if you make someone pay more than he should.
David Graeber has a story in his book "Debt", about barter: two tribes meet each other, which is a conflictual situation. Part of the ceremony is exchanging one item, where each party does not want to give something valuable but wants to get something valuable. So they try to cheat each other, since they won't see each other again. But when one of the parties notices being cheated after the deal, this will cause a war.
And even the idea of money is putting an equal sign between giving and getting.
So I think it is a misunderstanding, that the price reflects, how much of value one party sees in the object. It is more, how much effort it was needed by the seller to produce the object. Since he will not reveal his effort, the buyer must guess it based on his experience.
If he finds out later, he did pay way too much, he will be angry, though it would have cost him much more, to produce the object himself.