EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
My latest NYT column hits some familiar themes: Aesthetics is up, Veblen was wrong, prices tell us more than technocrats can measure...
OSCAR WILDE defined a cynic as someone who "knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." To many people, that sounds like an economist or an executive.
But Wilde's witticism ignores what prices do. They convey information about how people value different goods, including the intangibles an aesthete like Wilde would care about most.
Those hard-to-count intangibles are an increasingly important part of the economy. Competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that many businesses can no longer distinguish themselves with price and performance. To add value, they turn to aesthetics: the look and feel of people, places and things.
The rest is here.