I don’t think there are any important caveats, and I also wouldn’t expect there to be. The reason I wouldn’t is that if the best things in life weren’t cheap, it would mean that the best things in life are the things that require lots of highly skilled labour that can’t be amortised across a large number of people.
When things are expensive and highly desired, market forces incentivise people to put a lot of effort into making those things less expensive, so the only things that tend to remain that way are:
A) Things where there are hard constraints on how much effort needs to be put into creating them.
B) Things that derive a large part of their perceived value from being produced in a way that requires lots of bespoke highly skilled labour.
Things that are B are not the best things in life almost by definition, and so few tangible products in the modern world are A (as opposed to say, human relationships) that they are unlikely to coincide with the best things in life.
Interesting take. I don’t know enough about markets to really say. To feel confident in your argument I’d want to feel confident that 1) your list of A and B is exhaustive and 2) that both A and B are true. To feel confident in 1 and 2, I’d want to see if I could come up with counterexamples. That seems like a difficult thing for a person to do though, because the space of best things is large.
I don’t think there are any important caveats, and I also wouldn’t expect there to be. The reason I wouldn’t is that if the best things in life weren’t cheap, it would mean that the best things in life are the things that require lots of highly skilled labour that can’t be amortised across a large number of people.
When things are expensive and highly desired, market forces incentivise people to put a lot of effort into making those things less expensive, so the only things that tend to remain that way are:
A) Things where there are hard constraints on how much effort needs to be put into creating them.
B) Things that derive a large part of their perceived value from being produced in a way that requires lots of bespoke highly skilled labour.
Things that are B are not the best things in life almost by definition, and so few tangible products in the modern world are A (as opposed to say, human relationships) that they are unlikely to coincide with the best things in life.
Interesting take. I don’t know enough about markets to really say. To feel confident in your argument I’d want to feel confident that 1) your list of A and B is exhaustive and 2) that both A and B are true. To feel confident in 1 and 2, I’d want to see if I could come up with counterexamples. That seems like a difficult thing for a person to do though, because the space of best things is large.