The Fancy Rug Dilemma
epan.land
The Fancy Rug Dilemma
1–10 of 67 posts
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#2Hey HN - long-time lurker and decided to start writing essays (inspired by PG and many of y'all as well). This one came from months of joking with my friends about different "fancy rug" problems which led me to think about my own "fancy rugs". Enjoy!
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#3I can’t speak for the rugs you viewed, but some products take literally hundreds of man hours to make.
My partner recently picked up some fine crochet bedspreads. These intricate bedspreads each must have consumed multiple weeks of labour. I understand this is also true of hand crafted Chinese and Afghan rugs - around a month per square metre for an Afghan.
In contrast, those basketball shoes you collect are mass produced and apparently consume around 3 hours of direct labour. You could have many tens or even hundreds of those basketball shoes for the labour value of a moderately size Afghan rug.
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#4Bro almost discovering Marx, Veblen and the others
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#5[deleted]
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#6Hey HN - long-time lurker and decided to start writing essays (inspired by PG and many of y'all as well). This one came from months of joking with my friends about different "fancy rug" problems which led me to think about my own "fancy rugs". Enjoy!
Merging all the dimensions of the question into Value as a function of Cost seems part of the challenge.
Value is such a subjective concept. You finally get down to "We all need things transcending pure utility, connecting us to stories bigger than ourselves." at the end of the post.
Even if "bigger than ourselves" takes on some explicit religious angle--thinking the Amish here--there is still copious room to dislike the fact that the Amish are rolling around in "them new-fangled buggies" instead of being on foot like they were in the Good Book.
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#7I can’t speak for the rugs you viewed, but some products take literally hundreds of man hours to make. My partner recently picked up some fine crochet bedspreads. These intricate bedspreads each must have consumed multiple weeks of labour. I understand this is also true of hand crafted Chinese and Afghan rugs - around a month per square metre for an Afghan. In contrast, those basketball shoes you collect are mass pro…
Creating a single basketball shoe from an existing template takes three hours. Coming up with that design and all the associated expenses (marketing etc) plus the tooling needed to produce the shoe consumes much more labor and accounts for the vast majority of the shoe's cost.
Hand-woven rugs, on the other hand, are largely unique in design and created by a single person.
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#8I realize the OP was using rugs as a metaphor, but they are works of art, just as much as samurai swords would be for Japan.
Rugs were prized in nomadic and semi-nomadic cultures like Iran, where all your valuables had to be mobile. Traditional rugs require many, many hours of craftsmanship and are indeed works of art with deep cultural resonance. Turkmenistan even features a rug on its national flag.
Sadly, also a dying art despite its millennia of history as most rug weavers in Iran or Turkey have better options in factories or jobs. For the moment dirt-poor areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Tibet still weave, but the future is machine-woven rugs from China, possibly with machines deliberately designed to mimic the imperfections of hand-woven ones.
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#9Bro almost discovering Marx, Veblen and the others
...or marginal utility?
Re: The Fancy Rug Dilemma
#10This is not really Veblen situation. A lot of these are primarily money laundering outfits, the artificially high prices, are simply a means of converting cash into bank deposits. Similar schemes exist in art, sculptures, and jewelry. There are some mom and pop type stores that are legit and some of the money goes to actual artists who make these but the ones in Palo Alto (or similarly unattainable rent neighborhood rug shops), are not that.