On value, gladness and time
Rarely Certain gets a bit philosophical
Two things prompt this piece about the concept of value and how hard I find it to think about.
One is that I paid a ridiculous price for a bit of tat that I mistook for a premium product.
The other is an interesting message from a reader that led us to discuss, broadly, where properties of inequality, exclusion, skills and time intersect. That discussion is below, but let's talk about the lamp.
Apart from a 'proper coffee' machine, that lamp is my favourite purchase for the house over the past couple of years.
Nice, I think. If you like that sort of thing. It works well, here.
But I paid roughly five times more for it than I needed to.
Turns out it's a bit of drop-shipped tat from Aliexpress, marketed at a vastly inflated price by someone smarter than me. Finding this out created some cognitive dissonance that took a while to settle.
The episode went like this.
I was pleased to end 2020 feeling good. It wasn't obvious that 2020 was going to be a great year, for personal reasons and the appearance of the first global pandemic of our lifetimes. But it evolved into a great year and when a post featuring that lamp appeared in my LinkedIn feed I decided that I deserved a treat. So I bought it. From a business called Noxu Design.
Specifically, I wanted to treat myself to something frivolous, vaguely exclusive and a bit premium. It was a 'because you're worth it' moment.
I paid £139. It came. I loved it and still do.
Before Christmas just passed I decided to buy one for my daughter, who'll be moving house this year. So I dug out the purchase email, went to Noxu Design dot com and was presented with a special offer. The discount I was being presented with made the 'Kōnā Floor Lamp' (note the nice kinda Skandi vibe going on there) more expensive than I'd paid a year ago. Something felt a bit off. The site was kind of screaming at me. You'll see for yourself what I mean, if you can be bothered finding it.
So I looked for another lamp and immediately found my 'Kōnā Floor Lamp' on every cheap Chinese tat online outlet there is, including Aliexpress. It wasn't £139 there. It was €31.21.
You can get it even cheaper in China.
A bit more Googling then brought up various disparaging articles about Noxu Design not really being an 'award-winning' design-led producer of nice light fittings, but an SEO-jacking drop-shipping enterprise. Some - like the author of this Twitter thread - call Noxu Design a scam.
I'm not sure it's a fraudulent or dishonest act to do really good SEO, product presentation and sell stuff at ludicrously inflated prices, so I wouldn't call it a scam. Although, saying you've won awards but not saying which ones is sailing close to the wind.
But I would call myself daft for being taken in, because I could have also bought at least two weeks worth of groceries (living in France is expensive) on top of a nice light if I'd done a bit of due diligence on the 'Kōnā Floor Lamp'.
I might even have bought more groceries, because there's a good chance I wouldn't have bought it at all if I'd known it wasn't a 'premium' product.
All this reminds me why I write Rarely Certain. Which is about how hard it is to be confident that you're thinking straight, when you really drill into why you think what you do. And how vexatious some questions that seem simple on the surface turn out to be when you think about them more deeply.
Was my lamp worth it? I've really enjoyed the lamp. I've never regretted spending the money on it. If I hadn't decided to buy another one I'd still think it's sort of high-end because I'd never have known otherwise.
Does finding out that it's just cheap tat change the value of it? Apart from the banal observation that value is what someone will pay for something I've realised that I don't know how to think about value.
In the end I didn't buy one for my daughter because I suddenly thought about how the earth doesn't need to yield resources so people can have cheap fucking LED floor lamps that come with a remote control. And people are starving out there, you know. But only because it's cheap. I'd have bought her one if it was expensive. How ridiculous is that.
All this makes me want to think better about value, though. Is the value of a thing found in one's reaction to the thing? Is it in the labour that went into making it? What is the combination of intrinsic and extrinsic qualities of a thing that equals its value. Where does the impact on our planet fit in?
To say that most of us probably acquire something with money or acquire money with our labour most days, I'm kind of surprised to have been so wrong-footed by thinking about what value actually is. It's a bit like the sky. It's just there.
One of the corollaries to lampgate was that it prompted me to pick up with a reader who suggested a while back that I might consider finding other ways to charge for the paywalled editions of Rarely Certain.
Ivor Tymchak and me were mutuals on Twitter (ie we followed each other). I liked him for his thoughtful and unobvious takes on things and was pleased to notice his name appear as a sign-up when I started Rarely Certain.
What follows is our exchange on his question of how I might broaden the concept of a full subscription to this newsletter. I think it's a good jumping off point for thinking about value.
[Mike to Ivor]
Your note about alternatives to financial payment in return for 'exclusive' content got me thinking in some ways I didn't expect.
It's worth mentioning first something I noticed in my internal reaction to your comment about ownership as "the tap root of all inequality".
What I thought was 'I'm trying not to be political and here's Ivor trying to influence me to become an influencer for equality'.
And then 'if I give away all of my labour for no money how am I going to pay my big dental bill and afford the gate I need to install at home to keep the dog safe'.
But I thought past that and realised that there are actually some very useful things that I would exchange my subscriber-only posts for, that aren't money. Firstly, as you suggest, there's research. There are some things I want to write about but don't, because I haven't done the research. An example of this is that I never get round to reading the court transcripts of a certain case to carefully check an idea I have about what was and wasn't mentioned as evidence.
Then I thought of a few other things that I'd be very happy to exchange my 'exclusive' subscriber articles for. I currently use stock photos (or sometimes my own pics) in articles. Rarely Certain would be a better newsletter if it had proper illustrations. Even just the simple kind that Tim Urban uses in his Wait But Why thing. I've tried to do this myself but ended up nowhere.
Then I thought about other digitally available skills that I lack, but which someone could help with. Nothing to do with the newsletter. Like helping me with music production problems I often encounter (how to get this sound or that number of repeats on a delay effect, kind of problems that I end up skirting around).
So the thought I had was that an economy based around exchange of skills, not just cash, would be fantastic. I still need cash because my dentist and the local bricoleur probably wouldn't be happy for me to pay them with some fancy written words (pretty much the only skill I have to offer). But there’s definitely something interesting here. So, thank you for sparking this train of thought.
You've been reading about this. What are your current thoughts on how we might start to introduce skills and time as an alternative to money?
[Ivor to Mike]
I have personal experience of being involved with a creative Timebank. The concept is straightforward: members of the time bank list their skills and when someone requires one of the skills they hire them for a period of time. This time is logged and the hired person has a time credit which they can spend on other skills.
The beauty of this scheme is that someone who is time rich but cash poor can accrue lots of credit to further their own projects. Often, labouring at an event is one of the skills in high demand so no special ‘talent’ (other than reliability) is required.
What I find fascinating about this setup is that the question of value often comes up: is the time of a highly-trained dentist (to use your example) worth the same as an unqualified labourer? The answer is always, yes; time is the currency.
I suppose time is like the old gold standard: you can only ever have so much in a lifetime so the value of it is stable.
The downside of the scheme is administration - someone has to monitor the requests and manage the call-outs. Of course, they can claim their time in the form of credits so it’s equitable.
Another issue is working with other Timebanks. Although I’m with a creative Timebank (the definition of creative is often discussed) many people wanting to join ask if other skills are available, like building work or gardening (as I recall, no-one has asked if a dentist is available).
I suppose trust is another issue. In reality most Timebanks are so small it’s like working with a bunch of mates. Once you get over a certain size however, a system would have to be created that transparently showed who was owed what.
Imagine if a nationwide Timebank were set up though: what a challenge that would be to the hegemony of money. Of course, if it proved successful the government would no doubt want to tax it somehow.
[Mike to Ivor]
I get that your outline of the 'value' element is kind of reaching for a more democratic or non-elitist notion of value. Time, as opposed to the application of formal skills, seems to have that quality.
What I like about this direction in thinking is that it leans towards an idea of value that I'm trying to reach. But I'm finding it really hard to articulate beyond one of those nebulous whispy things in your head that won't quite coalesce into a principle.
Plus, I feel quite sceptical about time as a currency.
There's always this switching between time and money as value terms and I wonder if that's actually just another symptom of our attachment to the usual abundance/scarcity thing.
A formally retired person joins a Timebank and offers themselves as a general factotum, with no specialised skills, for 40 hours per week. And a busy dentist offers themselves out at 1 hour per week. I just had a bridge fitted, which is why that example springs to mind.
I can't get past a sense that the dentist's 1 hour has more value than the general factotum's 40 hours. Literally. I do mean that 1 hour of dentist has more value than 40 hours of factotum.
There are two reasons I feel this.
One is that the dentist could do 40 hours of general factotuming and it would provide the same results as the general factotum doing it. But the general factotum couldn't do the 1 hour of dentistry.
This was why I was surprised by your observation that in the Timebank scenario, time was considered kind of stable and transferrable like a hard currency.
Perhaps the value of the dentist's hour is just misunderstood. The value of the dentist's hour reflects all the years that led up to that hour, in terms of skills acquisition and experience around avoiding fuck-ups.
My view of the time of different people not being equal kind of spoils everything, doesn't it. It seems to mean that time is just as exclusionary and unequal as a measure of relative value provided by different humans as the cash cost of securing their services?
I suppose where I'm going with this is that I want to think of a measure of value that recognises something that I sense may be closer to its inherent meaning. Which is a nebulous set of feelings around the gladness of having received the thing in question. And obviously gladness is really subjective.
So I get what you say about time as a Gold Standard but still wonder if it takes us anywhere beyond money.
I'm sorry if all this seems muddled. That's because it is. Value is a really hard thing to nail down (plus, I haven't actually read any formal literature on the subject, like Marx).
Something else I was reflecting on was your original comment about ownership being the taproot of inequality.
I'm always troubled by most discussion of 'inequality' because it never seems very clearly defined.
Because I have enough resources to survive comfortably, with some left over for extras that I don't really need but get pleasure from having, I just don't care that there are people who are richer than me. I could be the poorest person on Earth at this point without caring.
So, if inequality is inherently bad doesn't it mean that I'm embracing something bad, here?
What's unequivocally bad (it seems to me) is people suffering for want of the basic necessities, like food, warmth, shelter and medicine. After that, the mere wanting of other things isn't suffering. It's just wanting what you can't have. This doesn't seem to be a problem that I feel like worrying about in the case of people who want to read more articles in a newsletter but can't or won't pay.
I suppose where I'm going here is that if someone is reading my newsletter they're probably not in the category of poverty where their survival is a problem. The reason they are only reading the free posts is because they don't believe they'll get any feels worth having in exchange for less than a quid a week. A harsh thing to acknowledge, for me, but there you go. About 15% of sign-ups do pay, which often surprises me in a world where the written word is mostly free at the point of delivery. Most of them aren't friends, either.
But here's the thing. I enjoy thinking about things that usually pass us all by, unquestioned. You've made me think about one of those things and you're willing to chat back and forth about it. This feels like an exchange. There's a bit of a feeling of gladness about this. In that I feel a bit better off in some way than I did before. So, in exchange for that, it's a no-brainer to gift you 12 months of 'premium' Rarely Certain posts.
This is what I meant above, by a 'nebulous whispy' idea of value. It might mean that your original email to me was therefore worth 50€, which is quite funny if you think about it.
Just before I go, here's something that always makes me baulk about 'free' content that someone has put some effort into creating. The internet destroyed journalism. Writers now pander to their audiences' feelings and shun stuff that might get negative comments. Clickbait has cumulatively wasted entire human lifetimes. Seriously sketchy moral ideas of 'harm' have terrified so many institutions that brilliant original writers are jettisoned all the time, only to turn up again in the much more interesting world of Substack. As an old school journalist I have strong feelings about rewarding writers, so all my subscription money goes into my subscriptions to other writers.
[Ivor to Mike]
But dentists retire too. Would you begrudge them doing other work because they have specialist knowledge? And they’re only useful when someone in the group has tooth trouble.
Also, how did the dentist acquire her skills? Who taught her? Which roads did she use to get to the university? Who built the roads, the university? How did she pay for things while studying?
Time is not opposed to formal skills: you come with formal skills and offer your time.
And skills vary. I have an incredibly steady hand, such that I could do dentistry or surgical procedures for you. I lack knowledge so my work would probably be less successful than that done by someone who’s spent years studying (although, I’m not sure how much studying was done before someone volunteered to trepan heads thousands of years ago.)
You can play guitar but not to the level of Jimmy Page - that didn’t stop you posting a YouTube video. Who was that video for? I watched it because I play guitar too and I wanted to see how your skills compared with mine - status is the real driver behind social interactions. And isn’t YouTube absolutely wonderful when it comes to learning guitar techniques? Your model suggests they should have premium videos for demonstrating advanced techniques (maybe they do, I haven’t checked).
Every question asked in society ultimately boils down to this: how should we live? What you’ve identified is a gladness in finding a shared interest with a fellow traveller. That’s what gives most people a sense of fulfilment. The fact that someone came up with the idea of monetising that gladness shouldn’t detract from it or worse still, poison it, as it often does. Inequality is inherently bad because it restricts sharing - you can’t come onto this headland and enjoy the gladness it produces from viewing spectacular scenery because it’s private property.
Property is denial of gladness.
I’ll finish with a story.
As a youth I was at a party, hanging out with musician friends when someone made a joke. I asked why people told jokes and three of us got into serious discussion. The drummer in the group stated with authority that joke-telling was an egotistical exercise and the teller wanted to be the centre of attention and appear clever. It was instructive that the person making this claim was also an egotistical showman and a philanderer. There was a specious logic to his argument but the bass player and I intuitively sensed there was something missing. When we insisted on further analysis the drummer left the discussion, presumably not wishing to have his assertion challenged in any way (man, little did I know this was presaging social media). My friend and I considered as many angles as we could envisage in an attempt to see what felt right. Eventually we hit on the answer: people tell jokes because laughter feels good. The joke teller is in possession of a device that produces laughter so their natural inclination is to share the device with others - for free. If people laugh, that is reward enough: they have shared gladness and created (or strengthened) a bond with others. Jimmy Carr decided comedians tell jokes because they want to be loved. That’s about the measure of it. Sharing stuff creates a sense of belonging, of being beloved. Once a middleman steps in and decides the sharing can be monetised, the tail starts wagging the dog and you get entities like Facebook pretending to do good with the sharing angle but end up doing more harm because the sharing is motivated by greed. True sharing is motivated by love (for want of a better word) - just ask why any musician might spend hours and hours creating music with others when there might be zero financial reward from doing so.
OK, one more thing: our paths crossed on social media and we have now shared some gladness through this exchange. If others reading this derive some gladness too, then our work has borne fruit. Please make it free to read.
I've enjoyed Ivor's thoughts on this thorny topic a lot and I'd love to hear from anyone else who's pondered it.
If you're interested in financially quantifying the value of time there's an interesting way to do it on the Clearer Thinking website. I went through this exercise and determined that I value my time at €75 per hour. Which makes writing Rarely Certain a pretty bad deal at my end - haha!
https://programs.clearerthinking.org/what_is_your_time_really_worth_to_you.html
Note to paying subscribers. I took a break last week, for various things including birthday celebrations, so there was no article. I’m looking into either pausing subscription payments briefly, to make up for that, or producing more articles. Either way, it’ll even out. Watch this space.
Some more about Ivor Tymchak.
Ivor is a professional artist and performer living in West Yorkshire. He paints, writes short stories, essays and songs. He sometimes performs as Gentle Ihor’s Devotion.