Well you’re just mistaken about this.

I presume you’re talking about De Beers (as this is such an often repeated meme)? Their market share is ~23%.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585450/market-share-of-d...

They’re also quite tightly regulated by the EU, and since 2006 have been prohibited from buying stock from Alrosa (the actual largest diamond supplier in the world). So their scarcity is most certainly not artificially maintained by De Beers, as people so often like to claim.

Am I? DeBeers may not have the major market share now, but I'm talking about how they, in a process that started over a hundred years ago, single-handedly turned diamonds into symbol of love, and held a monopoly position on them until recent times.

See e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-de-beers-2011-12?...

Since we can agree that they don’t have a monopoly, we can agree that they don’t artificially create scarcity.

You’re also quite narrowly focusing on the romance angle (which is the result of successful marketing, not artificially induced scarcity). I don’t think Quavo wears an iced-out AP as a symbol of love, for instance.

The artificial scarcity argument simply defies logic. The entire worlds supply of natural diamonds was created hundreds of millions of years ago, and the earth is done making them.