Professor Eric Smith
speaker
16 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2011
last heard Dec 2011
Professor Eric Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, actually, he's hit on a very interesting economic truth.
Jamie's initial idea about the fact that gold had more value than its pure utilitarian or material usages was actually quite a good insight on his part.
We use it in a variety of
production processes, jewellery and so on.
There's an appeal there.
But the actual price of gold reflects liquidity or money or a monetary component.
The aim is to get sufficient control of a good, a commodity, some asset, something that's durable, and then get a hold of enough of it to manipulate the price.
And of course, once the price gets high and you can manipulate the price, you can sell high.
In principle, it is possible, but it depends upon a lot of things just going right, and they virtually always never go right.
And a lot has to do with information in the market.
who knows what you're doing and what you're trying to do.
You need a lot of money.
These Ram Men can become valuable as part of an art or cultural phenomenon.
So there is this thing in cultural economics where value is determined by some sort of symbolic content rather than physical characteristics, rather than just the utilitarian material usages.
Then it can actually become quite profitable for him to have these ram men.
And I think Jamie is trying to embed this symbolic content into the Ram Men, just as he kind of observed that there's almost a symbolic content or a belief about the value of gold that becomes self-sustaining.
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