Does "Popular" mean "Good"?
Yesterday, I was challenged in the comments to explain how I could think that good and popular mean the same thing. Here's my answer.
I may not think something is very good, and you might. But so what? Maybe we just have different tastes.
For example, when it comes to chocolate, regardless of price, I am very happy to eat North American Cadbury chocolate, or Hershey's milk chocolate; and I much prefer them to French, Belgian, or Swiss chocolate.
More generally, if something is popular, it is undoubtedly good in the minds of those who buy it. In this case, "good" means "all things considered", including price, quality, etc.
But most importantly, who sets the criteria by which something is judged "good"? Is it the elitist snobs of the NYTimes? or is the philistines of the world? My preference is to let each person decide for themselves what they think is good.
As JB (my favourite drug dealer) wrote to me in e-mail,
I may not think something is very good, and you might. But so what? Maybe we just have different tastes.
For example, when it comes to chocolate, regardless of price, I am very happy to eat North American Cadbury chocolate, or Hershey's milk chocolate; and I much prefer them to French, Belgian, or Swiss chocolate.
More generally, if something is popular, it is undoubtedly good in the minds of those who buy it. In this case, "good" means "all things considered", including price, quality, etc.
But most importantly, who sets the criteria by which something is judged "good"? Is it the elitist snobs of the NYTimes? or is the philistines of the world? My preference is to let each person decide for themselves what they think is good.
As JB (my favourite drug dealer) wrote to me in e-mail,
[N]eoliberals love to sublimate truth, taste and many other human qualities by appealing to some transidealistic criterion that is reducible to nothing more than, "because I say" or "because I will not listen to you". People who disagree are ipso facto part of the problem, not the final solution. The telltale sign of the intellectually bankrupt are ad hominem arguments.
Category: Economics, Food, PLO (Philistine LIberation Organization) Posted on
Friday, July 20, 2007 at 1:12am
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Question - When the U.S. government enacted prohibition and the sales of bathtub gin skyrocketed, would you consider the product to be more "good"?
The difficulty with using revealed preference in the food industry is that a multitude of government regulations and tariffs completely skew the playing field.
Using an example from the previous thread, soda (or pop) made using corn syrup vastly outsells that using sugar, largely because of tariffs placed on sugar and corn subsidies. If government got out of the way, we'd most likely see pop made with sugar gain a dominant market share. Supposing that were true, would you still say that consumers prefer pop with corn syrup? I sure wouldn't.
When the gubmnt limits the choice set, you're right that the remaining choice options might not be as good in consumers' eyes as some of the choices in the larger set.
However, even within the limited choice set, the one that is more popular is probably better in the eyes of consumers. Using your example of bathtub gin, within that category I can readily imagine that some producers' gin was judged better than others' by the consumers and hence became more popular.