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How does "ostentation value" fit into the categories of "value in use" vs "value in
exchange"?
 
Allyn Young (1876-1929) touches on this, and on the question of our cynicism, in a chapter
on "The Meaning of Value" reproduced in the volume edited by Perry Mehrling and me, Money
and Growth: Selected Papers of Allyn Abbott Young (Routledge, 1999), thus:
 
"... If diamonds of good size could be produced at low cost, the demand for diamonds for
personal adornment would be likely to decline rather than increase. If the price of moving
picture theaters were, by reason of a supposedly high cost of production, greater than the
price of grand opera, doubtless it would follow that moving pictures would
become rather more fashionable than grand opera, and would be given in theaters offering
every opportunity for the ostentatious display of wealth. But we should not allow the
undoubted truth of these facts to lead us to the conclusion that the expenditure of money
over and above the amount used in the purchase of necessities is merely a form of
competition in what Thorstein Veblen calls "conspicuous consumption".
 
There are many people who love diamonds... not because they are expensive, but because of
their real beauty. And doubtless the great majority of those who listen to grand opera
will continue to go there because of the real appeal of that combination of musical and
dramatic art and not for any less worthy reason. It is easy to be cynical, but the
thorough cynic rarely sees more than the surface of economic life."
 
Roger Sandilands 
 
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