The School of Life: An Emotional Education

by The School of Life

Why, then, do we associate a cheap price with lack of value? Our response is a hangover from our long pre-industrial past. For most of human history, there truly was a strong correlation between cost and value: the higher the price, the better things tended to be, because there was simply no way both for prices to be low and for quality to be high. Everything had to be made by hand, by expensively trained artisans, with raw materials that were immensely difficult to transport. The expensive sword, jacket, window or wheelbarrow was simply always the better one. This relationship between price and value held true in an uninterrupted way until the end of the eighteenth century, when – thanks to the Industrial Revolution – something extremely unusual happened: human beings worked out how to make high-quality goods at cheap prices, because of technology and new methods of organizing the labour force.