For What It's Worth

Journalists wondering how the recession has affected average people have been writing a lot of articles about the booming resale market lately. Nearly weekly I read about how consignment clothing shops, flea markets and thrift stores can hardly keep items in stock, they've become so popular. It's clear from ubiquitous Craigslist and eBay references on TV shows, in movies and in daily conversation that society has fully embraced resale culture.

We're more eager than ever to get what we perceive to be good deals in exchange for our hard-earned (or painfully borrowed) dollars. The old distaste for the outmoded, dated or used has been replaced with a new appreciation for vintage style. But how can we determine the true value of whatever we buy, new or used, in an economy where the cost and accepted value of everything—a job, a car, a house, a suit, a vacation—keeps shifting wildly? How do we know what our possessions, our talents, even our own selves, are really worth?

This summer at a garage sale I got an exquisite pair of sterling silver, pearl and pink tourmaline earrings for $1 from the same woman to whom I gave $10 for a plastic Darth Vader full-head mask and helmet. The chic earrings were quite a deal, but the Darth Vader head, made of plastic, a few screws and a battery-operated voice box that still worked, was, to my mind, the real deal. The earrings were made of materials with more intrinsic value: silver, pearl and gemstone earrings are a luxury item. However, one can find nice jewelry in many places, but a vintage Darth Vader head that plays James Earl Jones' voice with the flick of a button? THAT'S special. Why? Because it's hard to find, and well, it's a life-sized Darth Vader head. (Duh!) And since value has a lot to do with scarcity, that plastic toy is worth more to me (and probably on eBay, though I could never sell my precious Lord Vader's head) than the earrings, even though the original sales price for the earrings was probably higher.

The rarer and more collectible an item, the more desirable it is, and the greater the value people ascribe to it. So a plastic bobblehead figurine of a popular athlete still in its cardboard box might be considered more valuable than a complete set of cookware, a jade bracelet, a pound of Godiva chocolate or a portable dog kennel. This is so even though the bobblehead's components are worth a few cents at most, and it does nothing but wiggle disturbingly when poked, while the other items can be used, displayed, worn or devoured.

The bobblehead's value doesn't come from its usefulness or attractiveness or the innate value of its components. It's worth what the market says it's worth, based on what the marketplace thinks people will pay for it. Its value, like the value of any item or set of talents, is based on its necessity and desirability as determined by a mixture of largely emotional factors, as well as on its scarcity. I know people who "invested" in Beanie Babies at the height of their popularity, thinking that their value would rise and they could be sold to finance vacations or retirement funds in the future. Now, I'm seeing those same special, limited edition Beanie Babies, still with their tags on, in specially made display boxes, marked at $2 apiece at garage sales. And they're not selling at any price. There are just too many of them and their novelty has worn off. The Beanie Baby market crashed because they're not novel, necessary or scarce.

Last week I bought two antique teacups and saucers in remarkable shape for $3 a set and paid the same amount for an old Big Boggle game. I happen to know that at an antique store, those particular cups would probably have been priced at $25 for each cup and saucer set, and on eBay classic Big Boggle games fetch an astounding $25 to $40. But even though I got to the sale six hours after it began, nobody had snatched up these treasures, because their appeal isn't universal. Their value is based on what they are likely to sell for at a particular time under particular conditions. These items weren't being sold at a high-end antique show or a vintage game convention, but out of an overfilled garage with people looking for deals on cribs and golf clubs and folding chairs. Value is in the eye of the beholder and changes constantly depending on necessity and desirability.

You might think $4 is too much for a pair of shoelaces on Thursday, but when your lace breaks in the airport on Friday, you'll pay $8 for a less sturdy pair in order to get out of the airport and to your important meeting on time. An item's value is what you and the seller agree it is at that moment.

Today I went to a garage sale and found a pair of show-stopping black shoes with chic hardware that had been worn maybe twice and probably cost $75 new. They fit me perfectly and cost a mere $2. A lovely and unusual Japanese fabric wall-hanging was only $3. The set of small, cheap wooden chess pieces with no board tossed into a Ziploc bag? The seller wanted $5 for them. I asked politely if she'd consider $3 for them (I wanted to use them in an art project), but on that she stood firm: $5, please. I politely declined. Considering that much finer chess pieces with full, inlaid wooden boards are sitting unsold on eBay despite rock-bottom prices, I have a feeling she'll be regretting not selling the pieces tomorrow afternoon at 4 p.m. when they're still sitting next to the unsold Hulk puzzle and the Yahtzee! game. However, she determined that those used, inexpensive pieces with no board or box were worth two-and-a-half times the elegant black shoes or the new Trivial Pursuit game in its embossed tin collectible box that I got for another $2.

And she may be right. For the value is in either what the market will bear, or it's in what something means to us emotionally. Maybe tomorrow a bidding war for the chess pieces will break out between a man whose late parents bought him a chess set at Toys R Us with similar pieces ten years ago and a woman who thinks the bishops look like her great-grandpa and the knights like her childhood horse Spunky. It could turn out that those pieces are actually worth $25 to someone. And maybe nobody else would have bought the chic shoes I got today. If I hadn't dropped by, those shoes might have sat there unsold, and then they would have been worth nothing to anyone. There's no way of knowing.

It's all a crap-shoot, and the decision to value a bag of game pieces at $3 or $5 or even $150 is based on many emotional factors as well as logical ones. That's why economics is an art and not a science. You can draw all the graphs you want, compare Hayek's economic vision with Keynes's or Reich's, review consumer spending habits over the past century till you're blue in the face, but economics still comes down to the thousands of choices people make each year about how to allocate limited resources. Which is why all the clever economists and statisticians in the world couldn't make enough useful predictions to keep banks, real estate markets and car manufacturers' businesses from imploding over the past year. They can track trends, but they can't always smell fear before mass hysteria hits.

For years, during booms and market expansions and times of lack of accountability and deregulation run amok, we've had unrealistic expectations that the value of our homes or our skill-sets were ever-increasing. We believed we would always find reasonably paying jobs or make profits when selling our real estate. When people were buying houses with no money of their own and not even being asked to prove that they could make the initial payments, trying to determine the real value of a piece of property was the furthest thing from their minds. There is no true, actual, real value to anything, be it gold bullion or Q-tips. It's all about what people say it is at any particular time. Get out a compass and you'll find a true north; buy a dress or a car or a house today and its value to someone else tomorrow is only a guess. Once you've bought it, its value to others is largely out of your hands.

Our current worldwide economic crisis frightens us not only because we have to buy cheaper food, go to fewer movies or concerts, take the bus to work or to move out of our comfortable houses. It also frightens us because it reminds us how malleable the value of everything around us is, and how tenuous our own value is in an ever-fluctuating job market. We don't know whether we might lose our jobs tomorrow, or have to work for fewer hours to stay employed, or whether someone else will hire us if we get laid off. We can no longer be confident that a good education, good references and good experience is enough to allow us to keep our position in the world, let alone improve it.

It's scary enough to wonder whether we'll be able to retire when we expected to or whether our particular pile of belongings has retained enough of its value for us to be financially secure. It's much worse to have to face the fact that our value to society is determined by so many random factors, and that it can change enormously, and quickly, based on things that have nothing to do with what we believe are the real determiners of our own worth.

Shocking and upsetting as this is, one positive element comes from this disturbance in our worldview: we are no longer as likely to determine someone's value or meaning based on what he or she does for a living. We're now less likely to assess someone's worth based on what vehicle he or she drives or on the type of home he or she lives in. For the first time in a long time, we are not what we do so much as what we are. When labels are so labile, it is easier to slip out of old classifications that constrained us, and it is easier for others to see us as being more than just whatever it is that we do for a living.

People from other cultures find the United States' fixation with career as a determiner of value and meaning curious. Go to a pub or a bistro or a taverna abroad and you probably won't be asked what you do for a living within the first minute of meeting someone, as you would be in the United States.

Here so much of a person's value is determined by how much money that person makes. If we do something wonderful but aren't paid for it (or aren't paid much), we're considered by some to be mere pretenders as people. Just because one's work isn't lucrative doesn't mean it's not real, valuable, worthwhile or important.

In other parts of the world, the questions of how one thinks and feels about politics, literature, music or cinema are at least as important as careers when choosing topics for discussion, both with old friends and total strangers. By the end of a spirited evening abroad, you might still not know what Saeed, Michiko, Pablo or Marianne do for a living. That can happen here, too, but it's rare; here we are what we do, we are our capacity to earn. Certainly one's career can say a great deal about one's values, one's dreams or one's talents, but it's only one facet of a life, one arbiter among many in determining a person's worth, both financial and social.

When we are shaken to the core until we reexamine our basic values, when we are humbled and forced to do things we don't love in order to save the things we do love, perhaps we can learn both humility and an appreciation for the people around us who do the jobs we don't want to do. Perhaps when we are shaken, we will also be stirred to look more deeply and listen more intently when we meet people so that we can see beyond the old labels which we formerly used to determine whether they were worthy of our time.

Update: Here is an interesting piece on the topic of labeling people based on what they do for a living. It appeared in an October 8, 2009, posting to Salon.com writer Cary Tennis's "Since You Asked" column.