Value is not a natural property of objects but a social technology invented by humans and refined over millennia—from gift economies to digital attention markets.
Price functions not as a passive reflection of pre-existing value but as an active machine that manufactures perception through anchoring, signaling, and the strategic construction of scarcity.
Luxury goods operate as costly signals in a status competition that evolutionary biology reveals to be deeply rooted in human social nature—but the rules of signaling are constantly contested and reinvented.
Authenticity, the most prized quality in modern commerce, is routinely manufactured through heritage narratives, limited editions, and the simulation of aura—yet the desire for the authentic reflects genuine human needs for meaning and connection.
The moral question of what should be bought and sold cannot be resolved by appeal to efficiency alone; it requires democratic deliberation about the kind of society we wish to inhabit and the values we wish to sustain.
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