The School Of Life: Why We Hate Cheap Things (2017) 📙

Meine Notizen

Preis und Wert

• „When we have to pay a lot for something nice, we appreciate it to the full. […] If the object has no merit to begin with, a high price won’t do anything for it, but if it has real value and yet a low price, it is in danger of falling into grievous neglect.“ (S. 11f)

Warum die Signalfunktion des Preises funktioniert

• „For most of human history, there was a strong correlation between cost and value.“ (S. 16)

The tragedy for our relationship with money

• „The tragedy for our relationship with money is that the hierarchy operates in favour of the expensive things. This means that we often end up feeling that we can’t afford good things and that our lives are therefore sad and incomplete.“ (S. 22)

Children don’t understand money

• „Children have two advantages: they don’t know what they’re supposed to like, and they don’t understand money, so price is never a guide of value for them.“ (S. 23)
• „Children would be right, if prices were determined by human worth and value, but they’re not; they just reflect what things cost to make. The pity is that we treat costs as a guide to what matters […].“ (S. 24)
• „We can pay less attention to what things cost and more to our own responses.“ (S. 24)
• vgl. „L-Faktor“ von Hörhan

Our reluctance to be excited by inexpensive things

• „We need to rethink our relationship to prices.“ (S. 30)
• „We have been looking at prices the wrong way: […] we are breathing too much life into them, and therefore dulling too many of our responses to the inexpensive world.“ (S. 30)
• „There are two ways to get richer: one is to make more money; the second is to discover that more of the things we could love are already to hand (thanks to the miracles of the Industrial Revolution). We are, astonishingly, already a good deal richer than we are encouraged to think we are.“ (S. 31)
• Ich bin heute viel reicher als ein König vor 500 Jahren und lebe in einem damals gar nicht vorstellbaren Luxus!