What makes a wristwatch that costs more than $2000 better than a $200 watch that looks almost identical?
The fact that the $2000 watch allows the wearer to exhibit to the remainder of the world that they can afford to spend $2000 on something whose purpose and looks would be equally well served by something that costs $200. It’s a means of advertising what they regard as their ‘success.’ You can probably bet your boots that if the implement in question were never going to be displayed to other people it wouldn’t have the same attraction. I once did a mini-survey on the attraction of designer labels. The results were fascinating: there are those who love them and those who wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole. (I stress that the survey was simply about the labels, with the premise that the goods were of equal quality). And you could, if you wished, look up Thorstein Weblen’s study of the leisured class, in which he coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ and listed the sort of things that people did to show that they didn’t need to work – the Chinese mandarins who grow their fingernails
