

Why We Hate Cheap Things - hunglee2
http://www.thebookoflife.org/why-we-hate-cheap-things/

======
bko
Reminds me of what Paul Graham wrote:

> Technology should increase the gap in income, but it seems to decrease other
> gaps. A hundred years ago, the rich led a different kind of life from
> ordinary people. They lived in houses full of servants, wore elaborately
> uncomfortable clothes, and travelled about in carriages drawn by teams of
> horses which themselves required their own houses and servants. Now, thanks
> to technology, the rich live more like the average person.

> Cars are a good example of why. It's possible to buy expensive, handmade
> cars that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But there is not much
> point. Companies make more money by building a large number of ordinary cars
> than a small number of expensive ones. So a company making a mass-produced
> car can afford to spend a lot more on its design. If you buy a custom-made
> car, something will always be breaking. The only point of buying one now is
> to advertise that you can.

> Or consider watches. Fifty years ago, by spending a lot of money on a watch
> you could get better performance. When watches had mechanical movements,
> expensive watches kept better time. Not any more. Since the invention of the
> quartz movement, an ordinary Timex is more accurate than a Patek Philippe
> costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Indeed, as with expensive cars, if
> you're determined to spend a lot of money on a watch, you have to put up
> with some inconvenience to do it: as well as keeping worse time, mechanical
> watches have to be wound.

> The only thing technology can't cheapen is brand. Which is precisely why we
> hear ever more about it. Brand is the residue left as the substantive
> differences between rich and poor evaporate. But what label you have on your
> stuff is a much smaller matter than having it versus not having it. In 1900,
> if you kept a carriage, no one asked what year or brand it was. If you had
> one, you were rich. And if you weren't rich, you took the omnibus or walked.
> Now even the poorest Americans drive cars, and it is only because we're so
> well trained by advertising that we can even recognize the especially
> expensive ones.

[http://paulgraham.com/gap.html](http://paulgraham.com/gap.html)

