2 ms·
I get the urge to collect, and I totally get why people feel their collections are valuable. But having personal feelings of value are not correlated well with
by wpietri 5y ago
I get the urge to collect, and I totally get why people feel their collections are valuable. But having personal feelings of value are not correlated well with financial returns! Indeed, as the Beanie Babies example shows, the more people have feelings of value the more incentive there is for others to profitably reduce the correlation.
In high school I worked in a library. Every once in a while somebody would want to donate their National Geographic collection. (For those unfamiliar, it is a high-grade, highbrow magazine that has been published for more than a century.) After subscribing for decades and lining them up on the shelf, they really valued those well-made treasuries of knowledge. But we were a library, so we already had sets. At least then, there wasn't much in the way of a secondary market. So we had to break their hearts and explain that we couldn't help them.
- kens 5y agoThe other aspect of National Geographic is that people didn't throw them out, because they might be useful in the future for a school project or something. This was such a cultural factor that the Journal of Irreproducible Results wrote an article "National Geographic: The Doomsday Machine", projecting that the massive weight of saved National Geographics would eventually cause geological subsidence, flooding towns and eventually sinking the US into the sea. They concluded that "Publication and distribution of the National Geographic magazine must be stopped at all costs!" if the US was to survive. https://xray-delta.com/2011/05/10/national-geographic-the-doomsday-machine/ https://xray-delta.com/2011/05/10/national-geographic-the-do...
- djbusby 5y agoI did my part. Cut out parts to use for school. Pictures of Amazon and Congo. Earned that C+! NatGeo is now owned by the Mouse.