Constructing Value - Virginity, Balls, and Art

August 19, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Robin Hanson has a post about “fake virgins” in China – women who have had “hymen restoration” surgery. This surgery, Hanson says, can harm men. As Dave Barry says, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. That’s what he says.

It seems to me many men really do have a strong preference for virginity, and are willing to pay a high price for it in a marriage bargain. This male preference for virgins seems as legitimate as the female preference for high status husbands. So it can do husbands a great harm to deceive them about virginity. [emphasis added]

The woman who fakes virginity is no different from a man who presents himself as wealthy when in fact he’s broke.

Imagine a woman [who] married a man in part because of his great job and income, and as soon as she has his first kid he reveals that it was a fake; his parents had paid for a temporary high-status job and big house/car/etc. so she could give them a high quality grandkid. Now that the kid has arrived, husband goes back to being a janitor with a bike and one-room apartment.

Hanson’s post got a ton of comments, many arguing that comparing virginity to wealth was ludicrous or worse.

But none of the comments made the point that immediately occurred to me: value is socially constructed. What something is worth depends entirely on what people think it’s worth. The baseball that ARod just hit for his 600th homer is indistinguishable from a baseball that anyone can buy at Sears for $12.99. But the value of the home run ball is far greater – just how much greater, we don’t yet know, but #500 went for $100,000.

(One of these balls is not like the other. One of these balls is worth $100K.)

The difference in value between real virginity and fake virginity (or no virginity) is like the difference in value between the ARod ball and the Sears ball. Or between a real Cézanne and a perfect copy. One isn’t inherently better than the other; it’s just worth more because people think it’s better.

(Click on the image for a larger view and see if you can tell which is the real Cézanne . . .*)

All realities and values are constructed, but some are more constructed than others. The reality of something depends on the degree of consensus and on the other practices and institutions that get built around it. The value of economic wealth seems like rock solid reality because we all agree on the value of money and because it is so central to so many other things we do.

The value of virginity, at least in our society (and maybe in China too), is much more obviously a matter of social construction. Not everyone agrees on its value, and it doesn’t affect much else in our lives. But in some societies, the value of female virginity has the same kind of reality that money has. The consensus is so unanimous that it’s impossible for people to see it as constructed. It seems entirely external to them. In those societies, virginity is also a central aspect of marriage, family, and gender roles.

For those societies, Hanson’s idea about harm may well be accurate. When there’s that much consensus, when everyone thinks that virginity is a treasure, then it really is a treasure, just like the ARod ball or the real Cézanne. The man who gets a fake can suffer harm, just like the person who buys the fake ball or the forged Cézanne.

Of course, in all cases, the deal harms the buyer only if he knows he got a fake, and the harm he suffers is greater if other people too know that it was a fake – more evidence for the idea that value is a social construction.


* . . . and which is by Joe Spooner.

Following the Money

August 18, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why do you have a cell phone? If you didn’t have one, what would be the cost to your work and social life? In other words, to what extent is a cell phone a necessity?

Mike Mandel, an economist, looks at what Americans have spent more money on since the onset of the recession. Here’s the table.

(Click on the table for a larger view.)

Here’s Mandel’s take on it:

Right there up at the top is America’s love affair with mobile devices, where spending has soared almost 17% since the recession started. Also supporting my thesis of a communications boom–spending on wired, wireless, and cable services have risen by 5%.

Mandel seems to think that all spending is discretionary. We spend our money on what we love. If you want to know what’s in our hearts, follow the money.

It doesn't feel that way to me. If my landlord raises my rent and I don’t move out, does Mandel think it’s because of my “love affair” with my apartment? (Note: the increased spending on housing was more than 60 times that of telephones. )

Yes, cell phones show the largest percentage increase. But in actual dollars, that increase is pocket change compared to the increase in spending on healthcare including drugs. The phone increase was $1.5 billion. The increase in healthcare was more than 100 times that. Does this huge increase reflect “America’s love affair” with doctors and prescription meds?

Are the cellphone and wi-fi a whimsical purchase, like new pair of shoes when you already have more shoes than you can fit in the closet? Or are they like a car, almost indispensable for finding and keeping a job?

Here’s the other table – items Americans spent less on.

In some cases, the changes are caused by individual choices. But for many of the items in these tables, if you asked people why they changed their spending, they would probably see themselves as not having had much choice. My rent went up, the price of gasoline went down.

Flic Dans Le Hood

August 15, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

Denis Colombi, who blogs at Une Heure de Peine (the phrase is an allusion to Bourdieu), was browsing the toys for kids and noticed that Playmobil has a new variation. In France at least, the Playmobil cops and robber set has been transformed into cop and rioter (émeutier).



I checked the Playmobil site for the US and could round up only the usual suspects – no masked, tattooed threats to the social order.

(Click on the picture for a larger view.)

Remembering the toys of his youth (Lego not Playmobil, but sans rioters nevertheless), Denis concludes with a bleg (the flawed translation is mine),

Evidently, this is not a response to “demand” on the part of children; it’s a creation by the adults who think up and manufacture the games for the parents. It would be interesting to reconstruct the evolution of bad-guy toy figures. If you have any sources or photos, please send them – I’d really like to publish some of them.

Update, August 19. I shouldn’t have stopped following the orgtheory blog. Three weeks ago, Fabio posted that he had noticed the cop-and-anarchist Playmobil pair at a toy store store in Ann Arbor. See his post here.

Science Ink

August 12, 2010
Posted by Jay Livingston

I can’t be in Atlanta for the ASA. But if I were there, I think I might be on the lookout for tattoos. Discover magazine has a collection of science tattoos.

(Click on the image for a larger view)

Is it cheating on your chemistry exam if you bring your forearm to class? The across-the-back formula is Schroedinger’s equation for the wavefunction of a particle (as if I really had to tell you).

You’d probably also recognize the finch beaks as Darwin’s, even without the signature.


The chemical on the right is Diazepam.

You can seem them all (there are at least 100) here.

What tattoos might sociologists get?