On million dollars cats
Moving beyond "Value" and the confusion created by this unusual word
Larry Poons: They’ve tried to make [art likes sports] where the best artist is the most expensive artist.
Interviewer: Is that not true?
LP: How could that be true?
I got a cat last year. It cost me $80 to get a beautiful, cute, living feline that now lives in my house. Most of the cost went towards reimbursing the shelter for their costs. The actual cost to acquire my cat was $0.
Many years ago my wife’s friend said, “If cats weren’t free, they’d be a million dollars.” I think about this quote often since it’s both ridiculous and true.
Cats are an amazing living organism evolved over millions (billions) of years to be a fluffy, cuddly, co-evolved domestic animal that provides many humans with dopamine-inducing delight and domestic utility (goodbye mice!). And yet, many cats are usually free - I can go pick one up any time I choose. In many countries they just run around the streets willy-nilly.
If they are so amazing, why are they free? And why does my cat cost $0 but a French Bulldog currently fetches over $10,000? Does this mean my cat isn’t “valuable”? What do we mean by “value”?
ON $10,000 BULLDOGS AND $27,000 MELONS
Lest you think I’m joking about the bulldog, here is a recent headline: “French bulldog puppy worth more than $10,000 may be latest victim of high-profile dognapping”:
It’s the second-most popular dog breed in America and can fetch thousands of dollars from a potential owner: Notable for its jowly face and bulging eyes, the French bulldog has become a popular companion animal. Mannie the Frenchie, a popular French bulldog Instagram account, has more than a million followers. The breed’s popularity can also make it a target for theft.
[… Dognapped Mario], was valued … in a Shenandoah Police Department report at $11,499.
“[French bulldogs are] popular, very smart and intelligent,” Pierce said of the breed, which has been among the most popular breeds registered with the American Kennel Club and is known for its relatively easy care. “A lot of celebrities have them as well, so people might see them as kind of a status symbol.”
Lady Gaga’s two Frenchies, Koji and Gustav, were taken in a February attack that left the singer’s dog walker in the hospital with a gunshot wound. [NB: !!] The dogs were eventually returned, dropped off at a Los Angeles police station. A few months later, another Frenchie was stolen in an armed robbery in Culver City, Calif. The coronavirus pandemic also prompted an uptick in dog thefts, with demand for pets surging at a time when fewer companion animals were available in shelters.
It’s gotten so bad that some friends with French Bulldogs are afraid to leave their houses on walks! Demand has far outpaced supply of these cute pups.
And yet, they are on par with expensive fruit in Japan: there was cantaloupe that sold for $27,000 a few years ago and you can also buy $4,000 strawberries and $880 grapes:
Across Japan, [expensive, carefully-cultivated fruits] regularly sell for tens of thousands of dollars at auction. In 2016, a pair of premium Hokkaido cantaloupe sold for a record $27,240 (3 million yen). […]
Cultivating high-end produce usually involves meticulous, labor-intensive practices developed by Japanese farmers. […]
Nichio’s [famous] strawberries each take 45 days to grow at his Okuda farm in Gifu prefecture [… his] largest tennis-ball sized strawberries, of which he only produces around 500 a year, usually sell for more than 500,000 yen ($4,395) each.
[Oh, there’s also these crazy grapes!] Rarity is a tactic also employed by the producers of Japan’s “Ruby Roman” grapes, who offer just 2,400 bunches of the large red fruit each year. […] First released in 2008, today individual bunches can sell for over 100,000 yen ($880) each — but that price can go much higher.
These fruits all sound amazing but aren’t these prices just a bit out of control? We live in crazy times, right?
Oh wait, let me tell you about some crazy manias from the 1800s…
Mulberry tree mania! Chicken Mania! Bunny mania!
“Down on the Farm — A stable of lesser known speculative manias including Japan's rabbit mania, poultry fever and the ostrich feather boom” is full of details of some manias from days of yore. A few highlights:
There was a merino sheep boom in the 1800s when people couldn’t get enough merino sheep.
And there was also the mulberry tree mania: “Mulberry trees are the natural habitat of silkworms and when several US states began subsidising their silk producers in 1832, the tree came into high demand. Huge plantations containing hundreds of trees sprang up all over the country.”
There was also Cochin China Chicken Mania: “In 1852, the exotic Cochin chicken from China became a must-have item, with The Times observing, ‘just now nothing seems so irresistibly attractive as a large gawky fowl without a tail.’”
And finally, there was Rabbit mania in Japan in the 1870s:
In 1872 and 1873, Tokyo was bouncing up and down with bunny mania. During the 1868 Meiji Revolution, Japan’s warrior class – the Samurai – were disbanded and suddenly had nowhere to go. Fortunately, they received some compensation and were told to look for investment opportunities, which came bounding onto the scene in the form of fluffy bunnies imported from Europe. These rabbits gained immediate popularity amongst Japan’s élite.
Monthly auctions were set up in the summer of 1872 and prices quickly rose, massive premiums being paid for rabbits with rare features such as yellow ears. Rabbits routinely changed hands for several hundred yen and one particularly valuable rabbit was sold for 600 yen at a time when the average monthly wage was only 0.57 yen. Indeed, such was the speculative frenzy that some people were prepared to exchange their daughters for rabbits and one young man killed his father for refusing an offer of $150 for their rabbit, which died soon after.
When these manias stop and prices collapse, what is happening to the “value” of these animals? Does the merino sheep and the rabbit in 1870s Japan suddenly become a less valuable living being when people don’t want to pay for them? Or is it rather that there’s something odd with this train of thought...
The problem with the word “value”
I am not a huge fan of bringing in dictionary definitions but in this case it’s necessary. Here are the definitions of the word “value”:
The problem is right here: if used as a noun “value” means (#1) how useful something is or (#2) your judgment about what is important in your life (e.g., “what are your values?”) but when used as a verb it means (#3) an “estimate of a things’ monetary worth” or (#4) having a high opinion of something/someone.
The same word is therefore defined based on one’s own frame of reference (1, 2, 4) and also defined in terms of other people’s perspectives (i.e., prices) (#3).
Going back to the beginning of the post, if we say that my cat is valuable, this is both a true and a false statement: my cat has value for me (as my judgment is that this cat is important in my life) but if I value the cat, my estimate of it’s monetary worth is $0… It’s Schrodinger’s cat!!
Now suppose suddenly all cats in the world except mine died, how would I value my cat? It’s price would jump sky high so I would value it quite highly using “value” as a verb.
All too often we incorrectly use market price to guide our determination of value and it’s not really a surprise that this happens. It’s baked into the very word.
The more I’ve reflected on this topic in writing this post, the more I keep realizing that this dual definition also drives various active debates. One place this most comes into focus is when prices rise quickly: during these bubbles and manias demand outstrips supply and it’s common to hear phrases like, “How could this {cryptocurrency/piece of art/other thing} have such a high price? It’s not valuable at all?”
Another time this comes up is when we talk about salaries for various professions: “Obviously [profession X] provides immense value to society so why aren’t they paid more? Are we saying they aren’t valuable?” “Why does [profession Y] get paid so much if they provide no value?”
Since price is and isn’t “value” these statements are both true and false. How confusing…
Sometimes supply goes crazy. Sometimes demand suddenly shrinks. Sometimes French bulldogs are suddenly in fashion. And sometimes in history people love unique fruits and spend tens of thousands of dollars on them... When this happens prices rise but should this also change how we individually think about something’s inherent worth?
Moving beyond value
Given these mental constraints I struggle to find the right alternate word to describe “real”, “inherent”, “personally-ascribed” value.
There is beauty everywhere around me. The cantaloupe I have for breakfast is in most ways as amazing and unique as the $27,000 one that sold in Japan a few years back - just because the one I ate isn’t as expensive does not make it any less worthy of my individual appreciation. My cat is no less amazing than the rabbits that sold in Japan in 1870. I’m surrounded by the infinite. And yet, it’s so hard to distance myself from the signals that radiate from high prices, scarcity and societal manias: When things become scarce their prices go up. When the prices go up not only does their monetary value grow, but my non-monetary, personal ascribing of “real value” is also tainted.
When I think about how best to overcome this dilemma I find one option is to move beyond the word “value” and to try to find better language. Christopher Alexander’s theories around “centers”, beauty, degrees of life and pattern languages is one approach that helps me untangle this knot. New vocabulary that is fundamentally dissimilar from price and market value, helps my mind be more specific about what I appreciate in the world around me.
The second path I try to use is moving beyond language through mindfulness. One approach is imbuing scarcity onto the ordinary. By forcing myself to think about how lucky I am to be alive, and how rare every moment and every thing, actually is, my mind is able to pay heightened attention to the mundane and make it feel scarce (and thus more “valuable”).
If this was my last breath how much would I pay for it? If this was my last day? My last week? My last year? Each breath a gift.
If I lost my eyesight how much would I pay to get it back? How about my sense of taste, hearing, touch? My mind? My muscles? Fresh air? Nature? All worthy of my appreciation.
By resting my mind on scarcity I can recognize life’s treasure and treat it with care. This is the path I follow when I try to have an awareness of things (mono no aware). It’s also the path of mindfulness for practices like mindful eating.
Beginner’s mind comes from the sense of innocence of seeing the world for the first time, and seeing things for what they are. When words fail us, we can try to move beyond.
What a great post on an all-important topic. The conclusion of the post about mindfulness is right on the dot. We assign imaginary values to things that we think will bring us happiness. That rare strawberry, the fancy car, and in fact everything else. The amazing, and ridiculous industry called “the influencers” industry is a recent attempt at creating the mania for dreams that people think will bring them happiness. As long as we assign worth to external objects, and the worth is our imagined level of happiness that an object brings us, we will continue the endless cycle of desire-momentary-pleasure-next-desire. We will sacrifice the bulk of our time and energy for that momentary pleasure. As you say in the post, if we truly connect with the most precious and unlikely event, namely our individual existence, when we truly see what a gift this round of existence in this world is that has been bestowed upon each of us, then no mega lottery can even come close to it. When we tightly hug our loved ones, and think of the unlikely gift called life that we are given, we are liable to be so ecstatic as to go out on the street and dance and tell everyone that they have all won the mega lottery, and then some. Cherish that breath. Ah….