I think what makes it different is the conspicuousness of these watches when they become a way to advertise wealth and status. But I like that artists/engineers can make a living by putting their time into producing such marvellous things. The world is richer for them.
I would say that mass-produced art should be pretty cheap, and these are mass-produced.
I don't want to argue about word choice. In the distinction I was describing, however imperfectly worded, watches like this easily go on the bulk side of the line.
> And you won’t find many watch enthusiasts who agree with you either about this class of watch.
What specifically would they disagree with? The idea that these 150 watches are made in bulk to a single design, and that watches of this class have many closely related designs? Or something I said that wasn't watch-specific?
If they're not made in bulk that's extremely interesting to me. Would that be like old guns that didn't have interchangeable parts, each one carefully and individually refined by expert hand to fit together? More so? Less so? How much variance is there between pieces? (I'd guess many old watches are like that but I haven't heard so specifically.)
If I'm wrong about the production of 150 watches having some quality, argue about that quality, no need to argue about broader categories in a completely abstract way while introducing no other examples.
For your analogy, if I say a temperature is cold so we shouldn't do some activity, let's talk about that activity and how the temperature affects it, not how we categorize temperatures.
But this is beside the point. Regardless of how many copies are made, the creativity and ingenuity that went into the first one alone makes it something marvellous. Jaquet-Droz only made one handwriting automaton boy. But if he made 150 it would still be a contribution to human endeavour and I'm glad for that.
So it's true that I should classify batches of 100+ and mass production quite differently. Along with pure one-offs and batches under five. But my original point still applies. I think these different quantities should be treated quite differently in terms of how art can be very expensive.
In your other comment you said: Finally, quantity is irrelevant to whether something is classified as art. My point was that the fact that it was created at all is meaningful and valuable.
It's art, very good art, but it's also far short of 150 artistically different watches. Almost everything is art at some level, but the amount that the artistry should affect price depends on production quantities and methods. Most of the artistry here is one piece.
I also think it's good that it's accessible to 150 people who maybe appreciate the artistry that went into it, as opposed to 1 super rich guy who maybe doesn't.
All I'm saying is charity is really important, arguably more so than art, but when they're created with skill and artistry; appreciated and not just consumed conspicuously as wealth/status objects, such things have value too.
Or to restate and elaborate on my original point: 99% of the time, it's fine to use art as a reason to buy something. You don't always have to be donating every dollar to charities. But for any level of justification you want to reach for the price of a piece of art, the dollar amount that fits under "justified" depends on how many copies are being made.
Whether 10, 50 or 100 or 100000 of these watches are made, is the process any different? Is it more like a limited edition print. High DPI printing is an example of technology magic but you can't argue that the choice to limit the output of a printer to a few runs means that the print itself is not mass produced
This is called batch production. It is not akin to a printer and even if it was, limiting the production quantity would, by definition, mean it is not mass produced.
Finally, quantity is irrelevant to whether something is classified as art. My point was that the fact that it was created at all is meaningful and valuable.
Of course not. It's just as much an art.
But those prints shouldn't be priced with the same premium that a single original often has.
You don't have to mock me for using the wrong word.
I hope you realize it's my vocabulary having a slight issue here, and not my understanding of the world, right?
It doesn't matter if they're both "bugger all" compared to some arbitrary threshold. It's a huge difference in scale and methodology. There's more than two categories here!
And I don't know why you think I'm trying to die on a hill, the only downvoted comment in the chain is your first one...
Why does the production process have to be unique for the result to be art? It's like saying Picasso wasn't making art because he used paint, brushes and canvass like everyone else.
Bring $50,000 in cash on a plane to another country and you're a drug dealer/criminal, or at the very least, the tax inspectors want to talk to you.
Bring a $50,000 watch on holiday or a business trip, and nobody blinks an eye. Your average customs/border/security person probably no idea what a $1,000 watch looks like compared to a $50,000 or $100,000 watch...or they're
The Chinese in particular are using luxury watches to get around money export controls (you can't export more than a fairly small amount of money out of China.)
Further reading:
Tax evasion: https://thetruthaboutwatches.com/2020/09/uk-kills-new-watch-...
Chinese wealth export mechanism: https://www.ft.com/content/a9a34f94-9a49-4938-ae9e-ec4e6d2f4...
I currently have a Seiko 5 mechanical watch. It doesn't hack or keep time particularly well (runs fast) but I love it all the same for its quirks.
The base argument of democracy is that because none of us knows the downstream effects we all share decision making.
In other words: “that’s just like, your opinion, man.”
So when consumers vote with their wallets, this vote isn't democratic at all. People that don't have money in their wallets don't get to vote.
Woman can wear gold and diamonds on the neck, in the ears, on the wrists, on the lapel. She may carry a bag which costs thousands. Man can't wear any gold at all, except he is a rap star. He can't even wear cufflinks outside formal attire. Not sure about even a ring with stone. Maybe steel one with small diamond will not look extremely kitsch, but it is a big maybe.
Expensive low-key watch on steel or leather wristband is totally okay in almost any social situation. In case someone suddenly recognizes the brand - you always may say that it is a Chinese replica.
Not that I endorse that, just pointing out.
Why? Are watchmakers not people who deserve to have an income? Do they not then spend their income on goods and services that help the economy?
Are they using the surplus to better society or only to enrich themselves?
Also watchmaking is blue collar work.
Why? Just because they're good at something that takes effort? By that logic everyone who has a challenging hobby - and most hobbies are ultimately challenging - deserves an income from it. Would you say that anyone who's good at any sport, or any craft, or any game, or even knowing celebrity trivia, deserves an income?
IMO at most people who produce real value for others can be said to "deserve" an income. And while watchmakers produce something that a small number of people are willing to pay a lot for, it's hard to say that they're producing real value as opposed to some kind of Veblen status display. (Contrast that with something like a mansion or a sports car - although it's a luxury good, there are tangible ways in which it's objectively better than the "cheap" equivalent, in a way that a mechanical watch is not)
So value (in this sense) is not really between buyer and seller at all, but a common agreement between a large enough number of people.
What OP in this discussion did was shine a spotlight on that fact, maybe in the hopes of getting at least one person to change what they think is valuable, to ultimately help society redirect money to more needed things.
Rolexes are a status item. They're cheap in the world of watches. Many brands you've never heard of command far higher prices.
The value is in the fact someone who studied horology their whole life devoted a certain amount of hours and effort into creating something. People who love watches love the craftsmanship.
So "hours of craftsmanship and effort" is not what makes something valuable. It takes something else -- in this case that it's a status symbol. A long time ago it would have been certain tulips. Now it's watches.
Owning an actual luxury item is pointless if there's nobody to brag about it to.
This is a terrible take. So you're saying restaurant workers in high end restaurants don't deserve income, neither do musicians, or any number of artists and artisans based on what YOU think is valuable to society.
The value isn't in what they produce, the value is in the fact that someone will pay them for it and the worker will then contribute to and participate in the economy and society.
Good service or entertainment definitely has real value. But yes, IMO if people are producing something whose value is fake (e.g. artificial scarcity) then they don't "deserve" income; if they can get someone to pay them for whatever they're doing then more power to them, but they shouldn't feel entitled to it.
Which is exactly the situation
> they shouldn't feel entitled to it.
It's more that others shouldn't feel entitled to take away their profession for "reasons" when they very clearly are in demand...
Everyone is entitled to try to change fashion. If your profession is only in demand because of fashion rather than real value creation, you should make peace with the possibility that fashion will change, or find a different profession.
If I order wings with my pizza tonight, as I have done, and I decide to consume both of those things, instead of donating the money on the wings to someone else, I've directed excess to myself instead of to the betterment of society. And obviously that's the reductive, logical conclusion of the argument. What I'm getting at is that it's an interesting mental and philosophical exercise to figure out where that line lies. Does it lie with $400M super-yachts? Sure, probably we don't need that wealth going directly to propping up the yacht industry, which, itself, doesn't need to exist from a utilitarian perspective. But I'm not sure how to define where that line lies. Is it the old "know it when you see it" line? If I buy a 26' sailboat, is that still falling into the ostentatious conspicuous-consumption-that-could've-been-spent-on-others? Of course it is. What about a jet ski? What about a $400 kayak?
I'm not sure the answer here. I agree with your core sentiment that "I wish people would flex their donations to effective charities" in that it sounds lovely. I struggle with the idea that charities have to exist to patchwork fix parts of society and government that are inherently broken. Creating a construct that inherently hyper benefits a small coterie of people and necessarily introduces some inequities, and then hoping that that same small coterie of people will feel just guilty enough to donate to others to try to whitewash some of those problems... is inherently flawed. Obviously.
But I also recognize that the downstream and upstream of the middle of the bell curve of capitalism is basically what powers almost all of our jobs. We work because we produce something that someone, somewhere wants. Or needs, sometimes. But a LOT of it is "wants." And if it was _just_ needs, the economy would be an even bleaker place. We've seen what that looks like too.
That being said, I personally feel like, you know, a clever tax policy helps with a lot of this, if it's underpinned with effective enforcement and effective oversight and efficient use of those funds. But boy are those tricky.
- you can be relatively certain it's not spying on you.
- you don't need to charge it every week.
- it probably has better water resistance.
And yeah, ideally charities would not need to exist. I also believe that government could become a lot more efficient. I think a luxury tax is a good solution, provided that those funds are put to good work. The nature of these ultra-rich toys can make them hard to tax, though. If America wants to levy a tax, I can just buy it the next time I'm in Geneva.
(I say this as an owner of several mechanical watches. I love them, but they are strictly worse than anything decently priced in any watch store.)
Pass the extra liability beyond, say, $100k to the owner of the toy car. If some shitty driver plows into my crappy old car, they are out maybe $3k in property damage. If they happen to hit a supercar, then somehow the same action nets them a liability that could buy them a starter home?
Mind you, I live in BC, where there is only one liability insurance company, and they have a government mandate to insure everyone with a license, no matter how bad their driving record is. Which means that every idiot's risk gets spread onto my bill.
Hypercars are much better than regular/sports cars, and should be considered the atomic clock equivalent to the quartz watch - far more accuracy/performance albeit at a significant literal cost.
I do not know the real world implications of hyper cars on fuel consumption (I can't expect it to be very good, but I don't expect too many such vehicles either). For better or for worse there are many more mundane things that can have a much larger improvement for human life (eg reducing food waste).
This is precisely wrong. The rich do indeed owe society. They owe their wealth to the workers working for them. To the education system that educated their workers and made them productive, the roads that brought them to work and the health system that keeps them at work.
This is obvious from the number of millionaires produced by healthy, educated, stable societies vs others. Other countries produce fewer and then only natural resource millionaires in the favour of the ruling elites. But they can't do so without labour and the resources owned by those societies. The rich owe almost everything not produced by their own hands.
And comparing the figures of corruption in those countries to that of charities generally is so absurd it's laughable.
> They owe their wealth to the workers working for
> them. To the education system that educated their
> workers and made them productive, the roads that
> brought them to work and the health system that
> keeps them at work.
Assuming even further that taxes effectively redistribute wealth to workers, educators, and nurturers.
These are together three assumptions, none of which I think are true.
But even if it was, how would you quantify whether a tax rate captures the full, less-tangible value of what a society provides? If through lobbying or creative accounting, a billionaire is able to reduce his yearly taxable income to $100 then he's met your definition of fully paid-up, when obviously he 'owes' (in the ethical, non-accounting sense) a lot more.
Because society provides more than just economic opportunity, taxes are just one of the things we're required to pay back. We're expected to follow the law or sometimes fight for it (giving up some of our absolute freedoms), to be helpful or follow hundreds of other social conventions. If you insist on reducing all that to a tax rate, then it's so low that it points to a welfare state for the rich.
Defense seems to be a non-issue but domestic service is debatable. It’s disgusting but this is our reality. It’s the ultimate condemnation of “conservative” values.
As a millennial I would have joined the National Guard if there was a guarantee of no service in foreign wars.
I think a peaceful national service organization that guaranteed some kind of modest lifetime pension and higher education would resolve a lot of debates.
But, for most US military vets that’s already true of their service.
Except for the National Guard and the Coast Guard (which, as I understand it, gets some military money).