Have you ever wondered about how to categorize the world so as to make it understandable? Neat people and messy people? Fun places and boring places. People who find it interesting to categorize the world and those who don’t.
While in school it was pointed out to me that a French philospher named like a pair of blue jeans thought about this too. He called them Binary Oppositions, and claimed that they were fundamental to how humans understand and interact with the world - including how we build and sustain culture.
I have wondered for a while about a particular category of objects: Some things weigh less than their value in pennies, and some weigh more. That is, if you determined the value for something and obtained that value in pennies, would the pennies weigh more or less than the object? Think about it.
A car weighs about 500,000 pennies. That’s $5,000 - so an old Toyota pickup weighs less than its worth in pennies. Hmm.
A pair of blue jeans weighs about 320 pennies. You’d be lucky to find a used pair of Levi’s for $3.20.
Cell phones used to weigh 5 lbs or 800 pennies. Now they weigh 60 pennies.
You can buy a 5600 penny lemon tree for about $50. So it’s right on the border, like an old Toyota pickup.
I wonder if there’s some sort of logarithmic relationship between cost and weight/cost? There are lots of heavy things that aren’t worth much and there are lots of small things that are very expensive. Or maybe it’s a shotgun pattern with no correlation?
All the cheap stuff from China suggests that there are lots of small things that cost very little - although maybe there are Chinese pennies and the world probably looks pretty different if we divide everything up along the weight and value of a Chinese penny.
Check out these charts on toy imports and exports - the visualization is cool enough to be worth the trouble.
Toy Exports
Toy Imports