You can rightly call “color” an Americanism, even though you can find it sporadically if you look back in time. In the same way, you can call “humankind” a neologism.

The etymology doesn’t by itself prove a given form to be correct or incorrect, but clarifies people’s reasons for saying things. It is quite clear that people have recently started insisting upon “humankind” on the basis that “mankind” refers only to blokes, which it never has. Similarly, etymology can show us (e.g.) that “snigger” is not a racist term.

There’s nothing wrong with coining new words, but the fact that “-kind” is not a productive suffix (try adding it to any other word), shows that this is just a clumsy addition of “hu-” to the correct word.

Feel free to say “humankind” in the same way you might feel free to say “irregardless” or “on purposely”. Freedom is great. But be aware that it sounds faintly comical.

- If the advice is free then in some senses you loose nothing by taking it, and it might mean you realise your answer was in fact wrong, so you might as well take it all the time (and ignore it if you think it’s wrong)

- If the advice needs to be paid for, then if you’re certain of the answer then you won’t buy it – so you’ll only buy it when you’re unsure. If you’re blindly guessing then you might as well go for the answer you’ve paid for, since it’s got to be better than nothing

Which I think means you’d expect to see people following the paid advice more often – not because they rate the paid advice higher, but because they’ve only bought it when they need it.

(I suspect there is still an effect at work here where we value expensive stuff more, but I’m not convinced this study provides evidence for it – although it certainly doesn’t contradict it)

Some branded supermarket painkillers have particular formulations of multiple drugs – paracetamol and caffeine seems to have been popular – but this doesn’t work significantly better for me, almost the reverse, and come to think, there was that one paper that I got perhaps unnecessarily worried about when the BBC(?) reported on it, suggesting that paracetamol and caffeine together are bad for you, although that doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere – although even so, caffeine seems to have been dropped from some cold symptomatic remedies of the paracetamol and decongestant type. Another argument is that caffeine may not do any good, or perhaps they wanted to differentiate the hangover cure and energy products or remove needless use of decongestant for hangover victims. I find that if a hot clear yellow beverage deletes other symptoms of a cold then tiredness does remain.

Branded pills also used to claim to act faster, but I’m not sure about now. A dispersible paracetamol may be slightly faster, logically, and is sold without major branding at a non-trivial but non-usurious premium price.

I am not sure if Akerlof’s Lemon is correctly described, but I gather he did get a Nobel prize so it probably takes a bit of work just to understand what he’s saying. Upon the point made, I’d suppose that a second hand car is priced so that a knowledgeable purchaser will kick the tyres, slam the door and decide that the price is reasonable. An un-knowledgeable purchaser will merely assume that this is the case. One catch is that the seller may not in fact base price on a knowledgeable assessment of the car, either, but save the trouble and cost and just pick a number. Another is that the knowledgeable purchaser may be satisfied with a cheap deal that comes with the necessity to reflange the cognet tining every 1,000 miles, whereas the less well endowed do not even know what a tine-flanger looks like and would do better to pass up on the deal.

There were many scratched heads about why the market for ‘lemons’ compared to ‘plums’ was so important and how these rhetorical people couldn’t tell the difference between a yellow fruit and a purple one!

Why do people buy (and doctors prescribe) branded drugs when identical generics are available. Well the branded drugs might be better advertised, the doctors might be set in their ways, and the individuals might be ignorant. But I suspect part of it might well be that the act of paying more for something is associated with getting a better product, even if it is identical!

We are in agreement about how economics needs to take onboard much wider areas of psychology, sociology, politics, deontological ethics, etc. in order to actually describe things, as long as we are rigorous and evidence based when we do it. Agreement is good!

Veblen was one of the first to enunciate that to the nascent neoclassicists, which is why I used the term ‘even hardened mainstream economists’ before explaining what they think.

Pentapeptides come to mind. They must be worth it because that Beauty Editor Nadine Bagget says so on the telly.

In commerce it’s common for companies to implement the advice of highly paid management consultants when they had already received the same advice from their employees for free and did nothing. It’s not because they paid for the consultants but because the consultants had a reputation and track record or references.

We’re prepared to pay highly for what other people want.

On the other hand there are some great models coming out for music, my latest industry, couldn’t agree more with chinaphil on that.

If you want to test freaky pricing behaviour (free/cheap vs. stupid/ luxury), come to China and go for your life!

By and large expensive cars/wine/clothes/etc are better than cheaper ones. Why should we be surprised that have long experience of this we automatically expect it to be true? Unfortunately we forget that this rule has very many exceptions. Oscar Wilde said that a cynic knows the price of everything but the value of nothing: well when it comes to medicines the lay person cannot know the value of the drugs, but is influenced by the price.

Off Topic: Can I totally agree with Mark Wainwright about the curse of Bad Pedantry in language. People with a little learning think they can impose spurious “rules” on the rest of the population. The one that irritates me lately is the myth that you cannot use “less” when talking about countable quantities.

Tell that to Shakespeare, Austen, Eliot, Dickens, Hardy and all the great writers who seldom or never used “fewer”. Anyone who has read “Origin of Species” or “Voyage of the Beagle” can find that Darwin invariably used “less” for countable objects: there are hundreds of examples of this in his works.

There are a lot of marketing departments that are well aware of this. Sometimes they even plan to sell at lower prices but find that they cannot. For example, and I don’t know if it has changed recently, but for many years all attempts to sell cheap good quality lipstick failed. As soon as the price dropped below about $2, lipstick became impossible to sell.

A more recent example is the BMW X3 which is not really designed or built by BMW, and well, erm, I have to be careful what I say, but let’s just say that by selling the X3 at an “artificially” high price, owners just assumed that the X3 was the usual BMW high quality. BMW were found out that if they lowered the price, owners would actually check the quality rather than just assume it. And it worked, they sold lots of X3′s and nobody asked and any questions.

What Veblen finds is that increasing the price of something can increase demand for it, all other things being equal; and in economist-speak, that’s as close as we can come to saying we like it more.

But humans are not economic automata. Appreciation is not the same as demand. Economics is only dismal when economists forget this fact, and start thinking that they actually describe human life.

1) We all know that we start off as plebs, and that you do have to educate your palate (/equivalent sense) to appreciate the really fine stuff. Therefore, you might taste something really expensive and find it a bit yucky, (or open Joyce and find him unreadable) but you might know that if you eat (read) it a bit more, get used to it, there is a high possibility that you’ll come to appreciate its excellence.

2) There’s lying to others and yourself about this process, pretending you like caviar on your first try, or loved Joyce the first time you looked at him.

Because of (1), we do sometimes use price as a guide to quality – it’s a bit like expert literary opinion. We might also make more of an effort to find what’s good in something expensive than we would to find the quality in something cheap.

However, when this becomes an automatic process, and price is automatically associated with quality, with judgment merely a form of rationalization, then life’s gone down the toilet, really. Because price varies for many reasons other than quality: availability, marketing, packaging, etc.

Which is why we must all say hurrah for literature and music: a paperback by McEwan/Dickens/Shakespeare costs exactly the same as one by Clancy; a CD of Mozart/Dylan/Led Zep costs no more than S Club.

I believe people are much more likely to turn up to doctor appointments they have to pay for and to take prescription drugs they have paid for – but there’s also the costs incurred in running such systems…