The Inverse Value Paradox

The Inverse Value Paradox

By Dr Jeremy Mellins

I was sitting in my car this morning when Spotify, in one of its occasional acts of genius, threw up a piece of the Top Gun: Maverick soundtrack. And immediately I was back in the cinema with my dad, my brothers, and my son Josh, watching Maverick do impossible things in an F-18. We had indifferent burgers beforehand. It was a wonderful evening.

What struck me was the sense of a loop closing. I had seen the first Top Gun sometime in the late eighties, and in the decades since, the jokes, the quotes, the soundtrack, the shared references had punctuated, permeated, and slightly spiced the intervening years for all of us. Then there we all were, together, watching the sequel, and the whole thing landed with a warmth that had nothing to do with the film’s actual artistic merit (it is, let us be honest, big-budget popcorn, low-concept cinema, however lovingly and skilfully executed), and everything to do with what it had come to mean.

So I found myself sitting in the car, daydreaming about bumping into Tom Cruise in a bar and thanking him for what his films had meant to my family. I would be emotional. I would probably try to hug him. It would not be great for either of us.

 I am, of course, mercifully, extremely unlikely to ever meet Tom Cruise, and would almost certainly be too socially constrained to have a weird emotional outburst at a stranger. The point, though, still stands: I was feeling genuine gratitude for something I had paid for, and that gratitude came from the imbalance between what I had received and what it had cost me.

Because what had it cost me? A few cinema tickets. A Spotify subscription. Call it twenty quid across four decades, if you are generous. What had I received? Memories with my father and my brothers and my son. A private language shared between us. An inexhaustible supply of involuntary air-guitar. The ratio of value received to price paid is so absurdly lopsided that it barely qualifies as a transaction. It is closer to a gift.

Now compare that to something else I spend a few quid on: deodorant.

Perfectly functional. Does its job. I cannot tell you a single thing about the last can I bought, nor the one before that. I will not be composing tearful thank-you speeches to the CEO of Sure. The deodorant is useful, but it is not special. It is entirely replaceable, and I replace it without thinking about it.

Here is the paradox: the things we pay least for, measured in joy per pound, are often the things that matter most. My movie ticket was, by any honest accounting, the cheapest purchase I have ever made. If joy is the metric, it cost almost nothing. The deodorant, by contrast, was expensive; it delivered exactly what I paid for and not a fraction more.

The wrong lesson and the right one

When people look at the film industry, the instinct is often to fixate on the wrong end of the equation: the obscene wealth of movie stars, the yachts, the mansions, the pay packets that look like phone numbers. The envy flows upward, and it distorts the picture. What it misses is that the audience got a spectacular deal. You paid a few pounds and received something that shaped your identity, gave you memories, soundtracked your life. The value flowed overwhelmingly in your direction.

This is not a defence of inequality. It is an observation about where value actually lives, and it turns out that value likes to live in places economists find uncomfortable.

The paradox within the paradox

Here is where it gets interesting. A film, once made, costs essentially nothing to reproduce. It is the ultimate zero-marginal-cost product. You can show it to a million people or a billion; the cost of the next screening is trivially close to zero. By the logic of commodity markets, this should make it worthless. Things that can be endlessly copied should be cheap.

Deodorant, on the other hand, has real material costs every single time: the aluminium, the propellant, the packaging, the shipping. Every can requires fresh inputs. By rights, the scarce, material, costly-to-reproduce product should be the valuable one.

It is the other way round.

The film retains its value precisely because, while it can be infinitely copied, it cannot be replicated. Nobody can make another Top Gun. Nobody can manufacture the particular alchemy of that particular cast, that particular director, that particular moment in culture. Art is reproducible but not replaceable. Deodorant is both reproducible and replaceable, which is why it slides toward commodity pricing and emotional irrelevance.

So, we end up with two kinds of “cheap.” Commodities are cheap because they are interchangeable. Art is cheap because it is infinitely distributable. Only one of those retains its emotional hold on us, because only one is special.

Why this matters for the future

If you are worried about a world of radical abundance (and you should be thinking about it, even if worry is not the right posture), this is reassuring.

As material goods become easier and cheaper to produce, the things that cost real resources to make; the deodorants, the disposable commodities, the forgettable stuff of daily maintenance; will slide toward zero. They will become what I call fiat goods: things whose material cost effectively vanishes, the way fiat currency decoupled money from gold.

What will not slide toward zero is the stuff that humans make that is irreplaceably, recognisably, joyfully human. The films, the music, the art, the performances, the creative leaps that no algorithm can quite replicate (not yet, and maybe not ever, in the way that matters). These are the things that produce disproportionate joy at minimal cost, and they will become the centre of what we value.

The future economy, if we get it right, will be one in which the forgettable is free and the unforgettable is everything.

The great thing about that is that you don’t need the unforgettable things to survive. As such they cannot, with any power, be used to control you, coerce you, to force you to sacrifice. What this does for us, when boiled down to its essence is free us. It means that the only experiences we will need to find tokens of exchange for are the beautiful human ones. It gives humans purpose in the creation and consumption of the richly and deeply human while alleviating the pressure to toil for the mechanical and the banal.

In a world where the only things that requires a token of exchange are luxuries, money loses its place as a societal fundamental. It becomes an optional frippery. It goes from the line between starvation and sufficiency and becomes little more than a Pokémon card.

When we are free from the survival imperative to work we are free to pursue meaning instead.

Which is to say: the best investment I ever made was a cinema, and I owe Tom Cruise a hug.