Markup View

Author: Megaptera

Jan 16th 2013 at 12:36:02 PM

If you've got real life examples, please suggest them. I can't think of how it would work in real life.

Someone might manufacture a product to be inexpensive and excellent at the same time, for reasons such as making it accessible to the poor. For example, the One Laptop Per Child program manufactured cheap, durable computers that ran on free open-source operating systems and had hand-crank chargers. They were distributed as educational tools to kids in poor countries. The project was subsidized by periodically letting other people purchase the computers for themselves, at a standard netbook price point, and the profits went to support making and distributing more machines to poor kids.

BUT. Again, this is a deliberate thing done for a reason. The trope I'm talking about doesn't apply to real life because it's a moral lesson related to how we perceive value. Nobody makes an awesome product and sells it cheap ''just'' to prove to people that cheap things can be awesome, and to change the way people think about cheap things.

That said, people do make crappy non-functional things and sell them for extravagant prices. I guess the only real life examples would be expensive items that people spend a lot of money on but that turn out to be objectively crap. I'm thinking of a real-jewel-studded HelloKitty cellphone case that I saw once. Someone who disapproves of extravagance might sneer and say that rich people buy it because they're crowd-followers and have money to burn, while spending a few dollars on a product that does the same thing without the bling. But it's not really anyone's business to say whether something like aesthetic value is enough reason for a person who has the money to buy something like that, even without added functionality.

In other words, I think all real life examples are YMMV.