« Should smart men prefer the fiction of the past? | Main | Assorted links »
Markets in everything, Thorstein Veblen edition
A watch that doesn't tell time. Oh, it costs $300,000. And:
He added that anyone can buy a watch that tells time — only a truly discerning customer can buy one that doesn’t.
And here’s the best part: The watch sold out within 48 hours of its launch.
I thank Darren Klein for the pointer.
Addendum: I am reminded of Borges on Veblen: "When, many years ago, I happened to read this book, I thought it was a satire. I later learned it was the first work of an illustrious sociologist."
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 2, 2008 at 06:19 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
If you can afford to spend $300K on a watch you don't need to be able to tell the time. For instance, you don't have to worry about getting to a business meeting on time, as the other participants will wait however long for you to show up. Catching a plane? You're not bound by airline schedules; you have a private jet and can show up anytime you please.
Posted by: Peter at May 2, 2008 10:37:28 AM
Nowadays, watches are primarily jewelry. No one actually needs one to tell time, mostly due to pervasive built-in clocks in cell phones and similar devices. The purpose of a piece of jewelry is simply to look striking; any other functions (whether timekeeping or playing a tinny version of Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley) is a gimmicky afterthought.
Posted by: at May 2, 2008 10:45:26 AM
A watch that doesn't tell time? That is a bracelet. I know it tells day or night, sorry, its still a bracelet
Posted by: Acrite at May 2, 2008 10:47:13 AM
I thought that this sort of thing only existed in the
pages of Douglas Adams books
Posted by: SJE at May 2, 2008 1:04:46 PM
Some people have more dollars than sense.
Posted by: tommy at May 2, 2008 2:34:54 PM
I'm reminded of the (great) chapter on Smoking in Tim Brook's book Vermeer's Hat. At one point, 17th C China, addiction to tobacco was considered a requirement for the elite - while merely smoking for pleasure was the sign of the riff raff: "Elegant men, declared one elite commentator, 'cannot do without it however briefly, and to the end of their lives never tire of it.' . . . A gentleman did not smoke just because he liked to; everyone liked to smoke. He did so because his sensitive nature turned him into a yankee, 'tobacco's guest' or 'tobacco's bondservent.'" (P. 143. A fantastic read, by the way.)
Posted by: Josh at May 2, 2008 2:53:44 PM
I suspect that the inspiration came from a quite widely sold and unreasonably priced brand of watch called Fossil. If a watch named after something no part of which has moved for many millenia sells well, why not try one which blatently does not tell the time?
They made nine watches out of steel from the Titanic; perhaps two or three rivets worth of steel. The most convincing account that I have seen about why the Titanic sunk was authored by a man who had analysed a few of those rivets, and demonstrated that they were made of way sub-standard steel.
For economists, this is the best demonstration that I have yet seen of goods that are unsaleable at anything near average or marginal cost, but which sell superbly if priced ridiculously high.
Posted by: David Heigham at May 2, 2008 3:14:22 PM
Regarding Chinese mandarins and tobacco, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the preferred form
for consuming tobacco in Zhongguo was to sniff it in the form of snuff, which was carried around
in elaborately carved and constructed snuff bottles that one would carry in one's sleeve. When
mandarins would meet, they would exchange bottles and sniff snuff from the other's bottle. These
bottles were made from many things: jade, painted porcelain, inside-painted glass, and so on and on.
The finest ones from the era of the Qianlong Emperor are worth many thousands of dollars today.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at May 2, 2008 4:09:11 PM
If the watches don't work, how do we know they were sold out in forty-eight hours?
Posted by: imp at May 2, 2008 6:29:40 PM
It's repulsive to me that more than one or two dissipates have the discretionary income and the tastes to buy this watch.
Posted by: Neil B. at May 2, 2008 7:59:01 PM
What's the tourbillon? Romain Jerome made a binary watch out of it. Are they plowing money into R&D on the tourbillon?
Posted by: ideogenetic at May 2, 2008 9:28:59 PM
Just for the record, regarding the mandarin consumption of snuff during the 18th and 19th centuries,
the bottles, small enough to hold in one's hand, have tops usually made of semi-precious stones, with
cork that holds them into the openings of the bottles, and a thin ivory spoon extending from the cork.
So, when the mandarin gentlemen would meet and exchange bottles held in their sleeves, they would use
the spoons to pull out some of the snuff, which would then be place on their thumbnails, from whence
they would do their sniffing of the snuff.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at May 3, 2008 1:01:57 AM
I have a device that tells me if it is day or night: It's called a window, and while it wasn't cheap, it didn't cost me 6x the average salary of a college educated American worker!
Posted by: AxelDC at May 3, 2008 5:37:31 AM
I thought the tourbillon was some sort of new technology, which would make this less Veblenesque and more aligned with monetizing evolutionary R&D.
It turns out the tourbillon was invented in 1795 and there are tourbillon watches on eBay for $6.99.
This product seems to belie the notion that individuals know the best use for their wealth.
Posted by: ideogenetic at May 3, 2008 11:55:56 AM
Borges on Veblen, amazing. Mencken on Veblen, brilliant!
"What sound reason was there for believing that exclusive possession was the hall-mark of luxury? There was none that I could see. It might be true of a few luxuries, but it was certainly not true of the most familiar ones. Did I enjoy a decent bath because I knew that John Smith could not afford one—or because I delighted in being clean? Did I admire Beethoven's Fifth Symphony because it was incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists —or because I genuinely loved music? Did I prefer kissing a pretty girl to kissing a charwoman because even a janitor may kiss a charwoman—or because the pretty girl looked better, smelled better and kissed better?
"Confronted by such considerations, it seemed to me that there was little truth left in Prof. Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste—that what remained of it, after it was practically applied a few times, was no more than a wraith of balderdash."
"One more example of the Veblenian logic and I must pass on. On page 135 of "The Theory of the Leisure Class" he turned his garish and buzzing searchlight upon another problem of the domestic hearth, this time a double one. First, why do we have lawns around our country houses? Secondly, why don't we use cows to keep them clipped, instead of employing Italians, Croatians and blackamoors? The first question was answered by an appeal to ethnology: we delight in lawns because we are the descendants of "a pastoral people inhabiting a region with a humid climate"—because our dolicho-blond ancestors had flocks, and thus took a keen professional interest in grass. (The Marx motif! The economic interpretation of history in E flat.) But why don't we keep flocks? Why do we renounce cows and hire Jugo-Slavs? Because "to the average popular apprehension a herd of cattle so pointedly suggests thrift and usefulness that their presence . . . would be intolerably cheap." Plowing through a bad book from end to end, I could find nothing sillier than this. Here, indeed, the whole "theory of conspicuous waste" was exposed for precisely what it was: one per cent. platitude and ninety-nine per cent. nonsense. Had the genial professor, pondering his great problems, ever taken a walk in the country? And had he, in the course of that walk, ever crossed a pasture inhabited by a cow (Bos taurus)? And had he, making that crossing, ever passed astern of the cow herself? And had he, thus passing astern, ever stepped carelessly, and—"
Posted by: John Fast at May 4, 2008 2:25:02 AM
John Fast,
Those are magnificent quotes from Borges and Mencken, but they hardly provide a disproof of the basic arguments made by Veblen, which really depend on envy of our neighbors and subjective cohort groups. So, do we disbelieve that people in a neighborhood get upset when someone on their block tears down their house to build a McMansion (assuming it is the first one on the block)? This is true, even if the builder of the McMansion built it just because they enjoy having three unused bedrooms in their house and that library with no books in it...
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at May 4, 2008 8:27:24 AM
"Did I enjoy a decent bath because I knew that John Smith could not afford one—or because I delighted in being clean?"
There is a huge range in prices for bath tubs. People are prepared to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for gold plating, designer faucets, etc. Those expensive features don't make you any cleaner or more comfortable. Veblen's expanation is basically correct.
Posted by: Bruno at May 7, 2008 5:48:48 AM
There is a sucker born every minute. And two to take them.
Posted by: Don Meaker at Jun 8, 2008 10:07:35 PM
