Aesthetics—the look and feel of people, places, and things—is increasingly important as a source of economic value, driven by cultural tendencies as well as technological and economic developments.

Cited examples of 'damning' luxury consumption actually reveal pleasure-seeking, not status: the woman who bought a Viking range she rarely uses described it as 'a painting that makes the kitchen look good,' and Twitchell described the Armani store as 'like a petting zoo' because people fondle fabrics—both about sensory pleasure beyond function.

Some online living-donor communities advise prospective donors to conceal that they met the recipient on the internet and instead claim to be old friends, in order to get past hospital restrictions on stranger donations.

The increasing importance of aesthetics is in many ways a direct result of very high quality in the traditional sense of reliability and function—aesthetics is another dimension of quality (that which consumers value) being added once functional baselines are met.

Consumer value in aesthetics falls into two categories: simple sensory pleasure (the ability to say 'I like that') and meaning (people associate valuable meanings with aesthetic elements, which vary over time, across cultures, and across individuals).

Much of what social critics assume is status competition is in fact not competition but the pursuit of new pleasures—e.g., wanting leather seats after enjoying a friend's car is about discovering a pleasure one could have, not showing up the friend; and there is no single status hierarchy.

Social critics use the status-competition framing to dismiss aesthetic innovations as 'empty improvements' and as an indictment of the market (e.g., the Rolex watch that tells time no better than a cheap watch but signals wealth).

Aesthetic improvements have filtered down beyond the rich to mass-market retailers like Target, which use designers to enhance products and brand—demonstrating aesthetics is not merely a rich-person status symbol.

The toilet brush is strong evidence that aesthetic spending is about personal pleasure, not status: it is a low-status, functional, rarely-seen object, yet consumers willingly pay a modest premium (and sometimes hundreds of dollars) for aesthetically pleasing holders—it is a bad way to keep up with the Joneses and therefore must be for one's own pleasure.

Aesthetic improvements often coincide with genuine functional improvements (quality-aesthetic complementarity): the toilet brush cover both looks pleasing and prevents dripping; the Viking stove is beautiful and puts out far more BTUs; an expensive fountain pen genuinely writes better than a cheap one—though whether the improvement justifies the price is a subjective judgment up to the user.

The Substance of Style is fundamentally a defense of subjective value: consumers value things for psychologically understandable reasons that cannot be quantified on a universal scale because value is subjective.

Some aesthetic premiums have no functional difference whatsoever: Apple charges roughly a $100 premium for the black MacBook versus the identical white one, and Motorola found it could get $30 more for green pagers than identical black ones—people will pay extra simply for a different color of the identical product.

In competitive markets, aesthetic innovations (like colored pagers or beaded shoes) cannot sustain a price premium: once one firm discovers consumers will pay more, competitors copy it, the premium is competed away, and the aesthetic gains flow entirely to consumers rather than being captured as higher prices.

Beaded shoes illustrate diffusion: a new beading technology lowers cost; expensive-shoe makers may capture the savings for one season, but over time the aesthetic improvement filters down to mid-range and cheap shoes without higher prices, meaning consumers get more for their money.

Quality improvements not reflected in price distort inflation measurement: CPI counts a beaded shoe or upgraded hotel room as the same product as before, failing to capture the added quality/benefit, so price indices systematically overstate inflation—by as much as one percentage point per year—and therefore understate improvements in standard of living.

Starwood Hotels, led by a CEO from outside the industry who thought differently, reallocated fixed hotel-room budgets toward aesthetics and comfort—replacing the expensive television armoire with better mattresses, larger desks, framed mirrors, granite bathroom counters, and the all-white 'heavenly bed.'

The all-white 'heavenly bed' overturned the hotel-industry tradition of using dirt-hiding floral bedspreads: although white shows dirt and required special cleaning, customers perceive an all-white, visibly-clean room as cleaner (and it probably is), so the look became widely copied.

Postwar mass markets were defined by reliability and 'no surprise' (Holiday Inn's 1975 'the best surprise is no surprise' slogan)—getting everyone to a lowest-common-denominator 'not bad'—but once that baseline is assumed, competition shifts to special experiences, personality, and aesthetic intensity, requiring greater variety because distinctive aesthetics please some and alienate others.

The ability to afford aesthetic improvements at a mass level is itself a sign that the standard of living is rising—not merely that expectations have adjusted.

Adam Smith's principle that the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market explains specialization: a small-town carpenter must be a generalist to fill his time, but in 18th-century London the same worker could specialize (e.g., become a cooper); larger markets and trade enable more specialization, including specialized aesthetics.

The 20th century conflated 'large market' with 'mass market' (homogeneous, lowest-common-denominator), but technological and business developments now allow large markets that are not geographically located and can support highly specialized, niche aesthetic products—breaking that conflation (later termed serving the 'long tail').

The rise of specialty catalog sales in the early 1970s—and later internet niche markets—was enabled chiefly by two developments: computer databases and, even more importantly, credit cards (Visa/MasterCard) acting as trusted intermediaries that let small specialty sellers avoid running their own credit business while assuring buyers of recourse.

The U.S. faces a severe organ shortage that effectively kills thousands of people because of squeamishness about financial incentives for organ donation: about 70,000 Americans wait for kidneys, and even if every eligible deceased donor were used (about 15,000 kidneys/year), it would only roughly double current availability and still leave a huge waiting list—so the only way to close the gap given current technology is to encourage more live donation.

Live kidney donation is far less risky and less heroic than commonly believed: only blood-type compatibility is required (not a matching twin), a single kidney takes up the slack, and the main risks are the surgery itself plus rare cases of kidney cancer or trauma—making it comparable in risk to elective cosmetic surgeries or paid jobs like firefighting.

The fairness objection to paying donors—that only rich people would get kidneys and poor people would donate—is misguided: a black market already sends rich patients to unsavory sources (e.g., China, possibly executed prisoners), kidney patients are mostly working and middle class (a third are African-American), and any payment system would operate through the same public/private insurance infrastructure as the rest of the transplant system.

There is a federal entitlement to dialysis that costs huge sums for an 'iron lung' approach—keeping patients alive with hugely diminished quality of life while their health deteriorates, which lowers the chance a later transplant will succeed; this is described as grotesque and tragic compared to enabling more transplants.

Some hospitals refuse donations between strangers who met online partly over fears of under-the-table payments, but also on a hard-to-justify 'fairness' theory: it's acceptable to give to relatives/close friends or to give blindly to whoever is top of the list, but not to give to a specific stranger whose compelling story moved you—even though a directed donation moves everyone else up the list, making all parties better off.

Milton Friedman was a model public intellectual who combined great empirical scholarship with effective popularization and activism, believed (unlike George Stigler) that public policy could be changed through persuasion and evidence, remained open to evidence (his monetary views were consistent yet evolved), and never soured on academic life or saw the university as the enemy.

Even if government successfully implemented good default choices (libertarian paternalism), it would be problematic because success would justify more government control of the economy, and good defaults set in one year may be poor a few years later, yet government rarely changes things that appeared successful.

There is a limited amount of advocacy passion available, so spending it advocating for libertarian paternalism leaves less to advocate for smaller government—the two goals (making government do better vs. do less) are in tension.

Where government competes with the private sector, some service improvements (e.g., a better government cafeteria to attract employees) would happen anyway through market forces, so Thaler's libertarian paternalism is really just giving the government consulting advice and is poorly labeled.