So while the diamond thing was created through advertising, it persists because it has a real function. Maybe it could be replaced by something else, but that would probably be something just as useless to demonstrate commitment.
Still, if you can get by without the investment, good for you.
I see this comment every time engagement rings come up on Hacker News. Yes, it's a strong signal. But we're a bit smarter than that, and we can select mates who are smarter than that too. Perhaps this kind of peacocking will die out. Perhaps nature will select for mates who are level-headed enough to look at salary figures rather than shiny rocks. There are going to be a lot of people who realize that a down payment on a house or money in the bank will make their relationship more successful than a shiny rock will. I'm willing to bet on those people living and reproducing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory
If you change your spouse, your savings account remains the same. The ring you paid for is gone.
I like to think humans are pretty good at developing alternative strategies.
Besides, if you get divorced, you don't get your down payment back anyway.
Or maybe if you can find a way to mimic the effect, but make it useful, you have your hands on a very valuable startup idea.
I guess it would be something like helping friends move, which is considered a good signal for true friendship. I don't know (not an expert on this), maybe if you find a way to "help your spouse move" for the equivalent worth of 3 months of your salary, you are good.
Why don't you get your down payment back if you get divorced?
The whole marriage thing is also extremely expensive. I suspect for similar reasons - so that people think twice before throwing it away. In that case they also have angry friends and relatives who invested into expensive travel and presents and probably wouldn't be too happy if it was all for nothing.
But then I've also been with the same person for 19 years who also things the ring this is a scam.
That's really what it comes down to. But clearly there are many people who are quite happy making the compromise.
> Still, if you can get by without the investment, good for you.
I think you might be a little confused about the definition of 'investment'.
Peacock tails seem pretty stupid, too - but they have a purpose.
Accusations of astroturfing aren't allowed on HN. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9180466 and the links there for why.
If you believe you see evidence of astroturfing on HN, please email it to us instead: hn@ycombinator.com.
Also it's harder to show off reliably.
The ring is in many ways pretty good: It's always on your body, in direct view of your peers and it had absolutely no utility to the buyer except as a gift for the receiver.
So she should pick the charity. I'm sure it's easy to find ones which the husband would not have donated to on their own.
Classification societies already by the way have established ways to do development aid verification.
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...
On the other hand, just withdrawing the amount in cash and setting it on fire might cause less harm to the world than a blood diamond. What a bachelorette party... :)
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you...
Thanks goodness my wife isn't into "shiny things".
And how did it help the peacocks to feed itself or outrun a panther? You will say "but the ultimate goal was to transfer his genes and he did". Yeah OK, so the ring is a lie and probably first bad financial decision in a future long strike of bad ones that help dudes to get laid and then get trapped in the rat race pay check to pay check.
Putting money into a down payment for a house doesn't signal commitment or financial strength. You would have had to pay for housing anyway. Throwing away x times your monthly salary shows commitment and financial strength.
(Note my complete lack mention of any gender whatsoever, or any other characteristics. Regardless of what the population statistics may be based on any traits a person may have, what matters is whether this person standing in front of you can live within their means, and anyone has the capacity to pass or fail this test.)
You rarely or never see beautiful women dating beggars and homeless people. You often see beautiful women dating the rich.
Draw your own conclusions, but I observe and I see that financial strength is often required for attracting a partner.
Required but not sufficient.
Really, watch it. Both hilarious and sad. And yeah, "wasting" is a real thing (but as far as I know only for drinks).
I think that's quite sexist, frankly.
Of stupidity. Or not caring about the efforts of the person who earned that money.
Most of us are way above the peacocks, intellectually.
Lol - not really. Lots of signalling going on among humans. I mentioned the high heels, but I think most womanly things are like that: long hair and long fingernails show not having to work (manually), so high status.
Even drinking and smoking could be part of the game (showing off that you are healthy enough to cope with a little poison). Many, many things - signalling theory is essential to understanding our society.
Also, the beauty of a ring doesn't solely exist in the diamond, the setting is a thing of beauty - the piece of jewelery itself.
More importantly, CZ is far less though than diamonds so they don't keep their shape under abuse nearly as well. There cheap enough you could swap out the stone every year, but just keeping the same CZ in a ring does not work over a lifetime.
If a friend of mine was showing off her engagement ring and it was refracting a little rainbow on her finger in the sun (like this http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/CZ_brilli...) I obviously wouldn't say anything, but come on. Getting a CZ engagement ring is going to lead to an awkward situation at some point.
Not true, cz has a visual 'fire'. Plus, most women can tell at a glance.
If you paid $10,000 for something but could generally resell it for something like that value it wouldn't be a scam. But if you buy a $10,000 ring from a vendor and try to find a way to sell it for anything like that much, you will find you can not, and not only the usual "I can't recover the vendor guarantee and reputation premium" that you'll find if you try to sell things on Craigslist or something, but you'll find that you can't even come close.
It might be tempting to get into philosophical discussions about "what is value, really?", but that would be the wrong direction to go here. I'm happy to take value as a highly subjective judgment, because that is indeed what it is. My point here is brutally practical, and, well, exactly what I said, and no more... the problem here is literally that you will find that what you've bought can't be resold for anything like what you bought it for, and where that truth comes from doesn't much matter when you're trying to resell.
The art world is radically different. It is assumed that you are a smart consumer who is expected to defend themselves. And I'd also point out that if you spend a million dollars on something that turns out to be a really high quality forgery worth about $5K on the open market, we still call that a scam.
The diamond I have was purchased at wholesale price and custom made into a setting - it wasn't some off the shelf piece from Tiffany's. I think that where you purchase the jewelery from can also make a significant difference to its resale value.
A: Nowhere near as much, and B: That's what I was referring to with the "vendor guarantee"... the reason why your car loses its value when you drive it off the lot is obviously not that the car changes meaningfully, but that in the somewhat scammy world of used cars you will not be able to establish to anyone that your car really is brand new anymore, so you take a hit based on the fact that you do not have a reputation that says "I am $CAR Dealership XYZ and I stake my name on the fact this really is a brand new $CAR straight from the factory".
(Incidentally, to some extent, note that when people suggest that the solution is to always buy used, they often aren't taking that into account properly in their zeal to make their point. You're paying less precisely because the odds of you being scammed just went up. If you are, for instance, someone very likely to be able to detect scams, by all means, go collect your "knowledge premium" from the market and buy used. But if you are not such a person, think twice. I don't mean "never do it"... I just mean, think twice. I have family that was taken for a ride by buying used when they "couldn't afford" new... well, it turns out they couldn't afford "scammy used" either....)
Yes, that is one solution to the conundrum, buy at actual market value. In the longterm that's an unstable solution... if rings lose their signaling value entirely (see other comments), then the eventual stable solution is not to buy them at all. However, in the meantime, what the eventual stable solution 50 years from now will be isn't actionable today, so by all means buy something that impresses your friends and pocket the difference. My wife and I went a different route and bought a nice ring with two Tanzenite stones in it for, IIRC, on the order of $250 1999-dollars, and I still think it looks pretty nice. Tanzenite is a bit soft but we've had no problems, and I think it's beautiful but the jewelry community seems to think it isn't worth much. We were happy to come to arrangements with them on that matter. This is another way to hack the process, since people aren't consciously thinking all the way through this it can suffice to present a token similar to a "diamond ring" but that did not require the useless investment.
What does this have to do with an "open market price"? Most anything bought at retail price will not have the same resale value, that's just how resale markets work. They buy at wholesale and sell at retail. Pieces of jewelry and whatnot are not commodity bundles you can trade on a liquid market.
Retail art pieces aren't any different.. High dollar art trades at auctions (again, lots of liquidity), that's why they're easier to resell. But if you sink five grand into a piece from some gallery, good luck reselling it.
Maybe because the demand for rings is not for their commodity value, but for their signaling value? So buying a ring from Tiffany's is worth a lot more than buying one off craiglist? And they aren't scarce so jewelers don't need to snatch them up off the "open market", but they need to make high margins to cover the overhead of their fancy stores.
Are you looking for a cause to the "absurdly large" degree? Or just pointing it out as some mysterious conspiracy?
But there is a conspiracy to exploit people desperate enough to have to liquidate their jewelry. It's detailed in the article linked to by the OP. That conspiracy is what causes jewelry to have a resale value of maybe 20%. Compare this to 6-month old MacBooks Air (worth ~80% of their retail price) or a car you drive off the dealer's lot (worth ~80% of what you paid).
A piece of jewelry's wholesale value is determined by adding up the market value of its constituent components and then adding a workmanship premium. In an ideal world, consumers could buy and sell jewelry in the same way.