I’ve got a friend that used to express value in terms of the equivalent cost in burritos; if he was considering spending $20 on a new album, for example, he’d try to estimate whether he’d get more or less enjoyment out of it than getting four meals out of the nearest taco truck.
It worked pretty well for small to middling values but ran into scaling issues with large ones: a new computer system, for example, was intuitively incommensurate with five hundred burritos. Differing rates of hedonic depreciation also turned out to be a problem: a T-shirt was in the same economic ballpark as a burrito, but its hedonic value was spread out over one or two years rather than twenty delicious minutes of beans and lard.
The obvious comparison is to spread out the burrito consumption over equivalent periods. Assuming ~2 years of the new computer system - ‘would I prefer on any given day either a burrito, or use of the new computer system (over the old)?’.
I’ve got a friend that used to express value in terms of the equivalent cost in burritos; if he was considering spending $20 on a new album, for example, he’d try to estimate whether he’d get more or less enjoyment out of it than getting four meals out of the nearest taco truck.
It worked pretty well for small to middling values but ran into scaling issues with large ones: a new computer system, for example, was intuitively incommensurate with five hundred burritos. Differing rates of hedonic depreciation also turned out to be a problem: a T-shirt was in the same economic ballpark as a burrito, but its hedonic value was spread out over one or two years rather than twenty delicious minutes of beans and lard.
The obvious comparison is to spread out the burrito consumption over equivalent periods. Assuming ~2 years of the new computer system - ‘would I prefer on any given day either a burrito, or use of the new computer system (over the old)?’.
While we’re at it, I like the catpennies quote.