"He hand carved more than 6,000 steps over the years for my mother’s convenience, although she doesn’t go down the mountain that much."Now I'm not here to judge the man, but that's a damn lot of time he spent making steps for a woman who obviously doesn't need them. So either she valued the gesture of him spending his entire life carving steps in a mountain, or he was in reality probably not very good at discerning what her real needs were. I know that if in my house I spent all my time creating a gift for my wife that she didn't really want, she'd be pretty upset. This is why we economists prefer cash transfers to gifts. (I'm just playing with ya man! You're the bomb.)
Update: The other possibility is that he is signaling his type to her. Signaling theory can explain investments in seemingly wasteful, expensive, gestures, because the sender has private information about the type of person he is, which if known, would make a relationship with him very valuable for the receiver of the signal. If the costs of the signal are less expensive for "high types" than it is for the low types, then the market can separate the two types of people into high type individuals buying the signal and low types not, and in a Bayseian subgame perfection sense, all high types will be employed and matched with the individuals who value them. This is sometimes used to explain why men buy expensive diamond rings for engagement presents. But, I am skeptical that this man was doing this, at least according to the simpler Spence signaling game, because in the job market problem, the employer cannot discern the types of the workers ex ante but presumably can discern their type ex post. Surely in the 50 years this man spent carving steps in a mountain, we are deep in the ex post. By then, his wife knows exactly what type of man she married, and thus there's nothing to signal.
4 comments:
Well, what the hell else was he supposed to do for her? They freaking lived on top of a mountain completely cut off from the rest of the world.
It depends on whether he really needed those steps to get down the mountain or not, but it sounds like he didn't - that the steps were actually a gift for her. If that's the case, and she didn't actually need the gifts, then is this really what she wanted him to spend the thousand-plus man hours doing? There's really nothing else that she would've preferred he do for with that time? Maybe not - maybe she really did want him to spend 50 years making this - but if I had to randomly guess, that sounds almost certainly to me like a situation where the wife's actual wants weren't being acted on. Like I said, in my house, when I try to buy the expensive gift, almost always I'm dinged.
I'm only half joking around.
i mean, halfway being serious (which I guess is half joking).
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