Ben Shapiro

We determine what we are willing to pay in order to enjoy a sunset on a vacation as opposed to doing it from the back room of our house or apartment.

The entire science of economics, it's not a science, but the entire idea of economics is that it's about trade-offs.

And so if you would seek to elide the trade-off by pretending

that we don't put a value on anything, that most things... So there's an example that JD uses in his book that I find particularly absurd from this particular chapter.

And the example that he uses is with regard to Japan.

And basically, he starts his chapter by saying that people are talking about stagnation of the economy in Japan, which has been a massive problem for Japan

for legitimately two decades if you go back to the 1980s michael creighton was writing books about how japan was going to take over the united states and if you got to the 1990s the japanese economy plummeted and then just stagnated and it's been stagnating since then i mean literally for 30 years it's been stagnating and he says well i don't believe in economics basically because i went to japan and i tasted their strawberries

And I wish I were kidding, but I'm not.

He literally says that the strawberries in Japan, it's one of the worst takes I think I've ever seen.

He makes the case that because strawberries taste better in Japan, therefore economics can't measure that strawberries taste better.

Well, that's not true.

If you have a better tasting strawberry from Japan in the United States, some people will be willing to pay more for that.

And actually, if JD had done half a second of research on, for example, Japanese strawberries, the topic that he is writing about,

He would understand the reason that strawberries taste better in Japan is because they are a delicacy in Japan.

And there is a full-scale luxury industry for strawberries in Japan that is designed toward making the best kind of strawberry.

So the worst strawberries taste better because in Japan, when you go over to somebody's house, you don't bring a bottle of wine.

You can bring like a hundred dollar basket of strawberries.

So in the same way that economics drives toward better quality at lower prices for certain products in the United States, that is also true in Japan.

It doesn't mean that economics doesn't work in Japan.

It's like making the argument that when you go to Ethiopia, the coffee there is really, really, really good.