The Upside Of Small Market Share

I have no ideas or beliefs about an afterlife. Reincarnation, paradise, dust and worms, I don't care - since we're all guaranteed an answer, I see no reason to ponder the question. But if reincarnation is the way it goes, I'd like to return as a pampered and over-boinked rock star. The old kind, of course, with stadium tours, wrecked hotels and every imaginable excess, not the new kind that drinks smoothies. Or a dog. I could tolerate coming back as a dog.

If you let dogs do whatever they want, they're the happiest creatures on Earth. If you don't, they take a nap. An excellent attitude that I think we’d all do well to adopt. Although, I would want to avoid my furry friend's current behavioural compulsion of picking up thorny twigs and chewing on them. He's been confined to short lead walks while a jaw abscess heals. Poor thing, although to be honest, I'm more upset than he is.

When you're forced to walk the same few routes while a dog sniffs every blade of grass and pile of previous dog’s breakfast, you get bored enough to notice the most mundane things. The position of my neighbour's boiler flume was a particularly pointless observation, as was the amount of clover on a small public green (none of it, sadly, five-leafed). And a few nights ago, I found myself peering into a small construction site for no particular reason. It contained timber frame houses, a culture shock in England, where people expect housing to be built in masonry.

Bricks once meant quality in England, as evidenced by the large stock of older brick dwellings that still have hundreds of years left in them. I've lived in several such homes and none required routine maintenance. A few roof tiles replaced on my mother's house, a little damp proofing and asbestos removal are the only non-voluntary works that I recall ever happening in them. It saddens me that modernity is trampling this housing ideal.

My house is ostensibly masonry but it's young, so the bricks are crap. The internal walls aren't even brick, the floors are uneven and made from the cheapest synthetic materials, the loft is "non load-bearing" and the bathrooms have already needed replacing. Its builder must have saved a fortune by lowering build quality, but not a penny of that saving was factored into the property price. He took it all as profit.

He got away with this swindle because houses are valued by size and location, not materials. It's worth wondering why the market thinks this way. Why is a house that will last for the next three hundred years worth about the same as a similar-sized house that will collapse in the next seventy? This only makes sense if buyers are blindsided by something, and I think they are. I think builders have landed on the fortuitous side of a framing issue.

Less than 10% of housing in England was built since the turn of the millennium - the other 90% is older and better. I think the average house buyer sets their expectation of price on the assumption that they'll be buying one of those far more numerous older houses. Builders are thus able to cut quality to the bone and sneak their new houses into that expectation - i.e. onto the market at inflated prices.

Which brings me to a similar phenomenon that really makes my tits itch. Why am I expected to pay £10.99 for an eBook? I understand that price for a printed book since materials have to be used, printing machines have to run, and bookshops have staff to pay. But pinging a digital copy to my eReader doesn't come with any of those costs, so why aren't they discounted? Why am I still paying them?

Could it be that since eBooks only make up about 10% of book sales, we've all set our expectation of price on the 90% that's printed? Do we then tell ourselves that the convenience of eBooks - downloaded instantly, don't take up shelf space, easy to carry around - makes them worth the amount we're paying, even though the minimal costs to publishers mean we ought to see hefty discounts? Perhaps an economist will do something useful and explain it.

And under no circumstances am I to be reincarnated as a bloody economist.

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