The value of a good is much trickier to measure than measuring the cost. Value involves considering a hypothetical question – what would your life be like without that good?
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Spending Money to Save Money
Beautiful Notgeld Example
From 1914 until the mid-1920s, the population of Germany and Austria were faced with a crisis of sorts: the value of the materials used to make coins was now higher than the value of their denominations. Understandably, the public began refusing to hand over said currency to purchase goods and its distribution slowed to a a virtual stop. In response, makeshift banknotes – not legal tender but used as such in local circles – were produced by local authorities and some companies, and quickly began to circulate.
An unintended side-effect was that the majority were beautifully and uniquely designed, and as a result many people were so enamoured by the colourful ‘Notgeld‘ (‘emergency money’) that they began to save them and pay for goods with their legal currency instead, thus recirculating the genuine coins; by 1930 the distribution of these notes (fashioned from all manner of materials including paper, wood, leather, photographs, coupons) had ceased and instead spawned a collectors’ market.
After the jump, view a round-up of some of the most eye-catching examples…
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Snake Oil Chart Highlights the Worth (or Lack Thereof) of Supplements
We’ve all got that friend or family member that swears by a supplement promising to stave off colds, cure headaches, or fix some other malady, but often they’re little more than snake oil. This Snake Oil chart matches supplements to scientific support.
The chart is a pretty simple idea: Items toward the top of the chart have strong scientific evidence supporting their health benefits (when taken orally by an adult with a healthy diet), while those toward the bottom have the least evidence supporting their worth. Each item also lists the supposed health benefit of said supplement. The larger a supplement’s circle, the more popular it is as a solution for a problem. Using green tea as a cholesterol helper is popular and strongly supported, for example, while the chart illustrates that although Vitamin E is popularly believed to help your heart and fight prostate cancer, there’s little evidence to support it…
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Facebook Soon To Be Worth Over $1 Billion A Year According To New Figures From Inside Facebook
Facebook is set to be worth over $1 billion a year, according to new figures that estimate projected revenue for the social networking site.
Facebook is set to break the billion dollars of revenue mark by the end of 2010, according to Inside Facebook’s new figures.
Tending virtual farms
Facebook has over 400 million users, many of whom spend an inordinate amount of time poking their online mates and tending to their virtual farms.
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Hospital Cleaners Are Worth More To Society Than Bankers
New research methodology devised by New Economics Foundation (NEF) to calculate the social value of different jobs has concluded that hospital cleaners create more than £10 in value for every £1 they receive in pay. Meanwhile “elite City bankers” – those who earn over £500,000 – destroy £7 of value for every £1 they create.
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Women Attracted to the Life of the ‘Retrosexual’
Seeking a husband with traditional values
The fairer sex may have all but abandoned the struggle for equality, for a new survey suggests that most men want a traditional wife and women are often only too happy to oblige. A British research from the Yorkshire Building Society showed that many females are making conventional choices by eschewing the sexual revolution plank of feminism in favour of more traditional values.
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Studies Show the Value of Not Overthinking Our Decisions
Fishing in the stream of consciousness, researchers now can detect our intentions and predict our choices before we are aware of them ourselves. The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision — an eternity at the speed of thought.
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Pew Study: Cellphones More Valuable than TV or Internet
Of those surveyed in Pew’s March Report, between October and December 2007, 51% said it would be hard to give up their mobile phone. Only 45% said so for the Internet, 43% said television and 40% said their landline phone.
This is a sharp reversal from 2002, when the same questions were asked. Back then, 63% said their landline phone, 47% said television and the Internet and mobile phones tied with 38%.
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