A $19 strawberry has caused a stir online. And of course, it's sold at Erewhon.

I saw a cooking or travel show that featured the guy who grows those a while back. Apparently they taste absolutely amazing, but I can't imagine justifying spending that much money on a strawberry.

In most respects, most of us probably have a considerably higher standard of living than Marie Antoniette, simply because of what technological advancement has provided us with.

e.g.

https://www.pressreader.com/new-zealand/the-timaru-herald/20160530/281784218342032

Ver­sailles stank. Not just the bod­ily tang one might ex­pect 200 years be­fore the in­ven­tion of de­odor­ant (that was 1888: a paste ap­plied to the un­der­arms), but a rank stench that per­me­ated every room, every cor­ri­dor, and wafted over the gar­dens.

‘‘I shall never get over the dirt of this coun­try,’’ sniffed Ho­race Walpole on a visit to France.

Ver­sailles, the cen­tre of French po­lit­i­cal power from 1682, had more than 700 rooms but no func­tion­ing loos un­til 1768. By the time of the revo­lu­tion, there were still only nine bath­rooms, all in the pri­vate royal apart­ments. The con­tents of cham­ber pots were of­ten sim­ply flung out of the win­dows.

The royal dogs were not house­trained but nor were the courtiers and their ser­vants who crammed into the build­ing. The re­sult was a lava­to­rial free-for-all, from which no cor­ner of the palace was spared.

‘‘Ver­sailles was a vast cesspool,’’ wrote one his­to­rian. ‘‘The odour clung to clothes, wigs, even un­der­gar­ments. Beg­gars, ser­vants, and aris­to­cratic vis­i­tors alike used the stairs, the cor­ri­dors, any out-of-the-way place, to re­lieve them­selves.’’

For Louis XIV and his later im­i­ta­tors, ar­chi­tec­ture was pol­i­tics, a way to over­awe ri­vals for power - no­bil­ity, princes and lawyers - and fo­cus at­ten­tion ex­clu­sively on the ruler. But while Ver­sailles looked mag­nif­i­cent from the out­side, on the in­side it was over­crowded, smelly and in­fested with ver­min.

Most of us probably wouldn't readily tolerate living like that.

French royalty could, no doubt, have live musicians or actors performing works that they want. But on the other hand, we have a vast digital library of video and audio of such scope and content...they could only comprehend them as dreams brought to life, created with resources well beyond what they could afford, because we have spread the costs over many and provided the output to many.

We can eat food from around the world in any season.

If I want the air in my living space to be chilly in summer, I can do so.

There are definitely some services that I'm sure that French royalty could avail themselves of that we cannot. But I think that it's easy to lose perspective of how staggering the increases of standard-of-living have been over a couple of centuries.

$19

$18

Normally, in markets, you can sell below someone else's price and customers will indeed come to you. Lower price means more demand. That is, this is a traditional demand curve.

However, there are some goods for which this does not hold. For such goods, increasing the price actually means that there is more demand. The thing becomes more-desirable the more expensive it is.

That's frequently associated with luxury goods. There, the price itself can make something a status symbol, or perhaps people use price information to try to judge how desirable the thing is.

The economic term for such a thing is a Veblen good.

A Veblen good is a type of luxury good, named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve.

The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.

My guess is that this strawberry isn't actually all that amazing. What makes it notable is that it, well, costs $19. It may be a Veblen good, in which case you may have a hard time trying to sell similar strawberries while focusing on the value proposition.

I saw that Zuckerberg had a $900,000 watch. I cannot figure out what would cause a watch the cost that much so I figured someone is just selling an expensive watch and a billionaire will buy it because it’s expensive.

So do you want to get in on expensive sticks we found in the woods? Starting price 200 grand