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Comment by AeZ1E | Hacker News Reader

the diamond is fab but is this really necessary? we need to focus on real issues! also, why do diamonds cost so much when they're just old rocks?

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I think 8 billion people can do more than one thing at a time.

[Citation needed]

Why do Michelin star restaurants cost so much when there's hungry children in developed countries? Why does finance and adtech pay so much when there's a shortage of teachers? Why is so much engineering effort and materials spent on luxury goods when infrastructure is crumbling? Why are five star hotels so expensive when there's a shortage of care workers for old people?

The answer to all these questions is the same.

This is downright silly and wrong. Diamonds are not expensive because they're a cut above other gems, they're literally only expensive because of a monopoly that upholds artificial scarcity. Michelin star restaurants are expensive because they do culinary arts on the highest level. Diamonds are expensive only because one family owns all the mines.

You forget the other side of the equation: very rich people or "suckers" are ready to pay that much for it.

De Beers hasn't had a monopoly in decades and is no longer majority owned by one family.

This isn't an ordinary diamond.

> The answer to all these questions is the same.

Only if that answer is "the world is incredibly complicated and each individual situation is laden with its own history, nuance, and complications." Because otherwise: no, the answer to all those questions is very different, because the world is incredibly complicated and each individual situation is laden with its own history, nuance, and complications. It's reasonable to ask about what those particular nuances are for a given situation without being brushed off like this.

This would bring the price down:

Mercury could have an 11-mile underground layer of diamonds, researchers say | CNN

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/31/science/mercury-diamond-under...

Diamonds are artificially scarce anyway. The big producers stockpile their output to keep prices high, and spread FUD about dirt cheap, just-as-good synthetics.

> why do diamonds cost so much when they're just old rocks?

Seriously? Economics 101: supply and demand. Or is this a rhetorical question, with some kind of social justice slant?

Why is it diamonds, and not iridium, pearl, or opal? Why does a diamond's value depreciate to nothing the instant it's sold, unlike gold? Why did the price of diamonds shoot up so drastically in the early 1900s? Why are the indistinguishable lab-grown diamonds in so much lower demand? Who are the major actors in the diamond trade, and what are their strategies and relationships to one another?

Many books could be (and, I'm sure, have been) written on these subjects. Don't act like "Econ 101" explains everything. "Econ 101" introduces a bunch of extremely simplified models that are later qualified, criticized, complexified, or even outright replaced. That's all fine if you're continuing on to get your economics degree, but I'd argue that someone who took Econ 101 without continuing into much more depths in economics probably has a worse understanding of the world than someone who never took it, because they take these ridiculously over-simplified models as some sort of inalienable truth. After Econ 101 you merely "know enough to be dangerous(ly wrong)".

> Why does a diamond's value depreciate to nothing the instant it's sold,

Ordinary diamonds, perhaps. For large/rare diamonds like this one, the value would go up with time.

couldn't participate as i was in rhetoric 201

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