dcdevthrowaway

Utility has many dimensions.

How fast a car can go is one, how many people it can transport is another, how few emissions it creates is another.

Someone might be willing to drop big bucks on a Tesla Model X to haul their family around rather than a used Dodge Caravan ... not because it'll get them between Point A and Point B more quickly or because it can carry more people, but because it doesn't emit CO2.

Point being that we don't all value the same things, and while I wouldn't make the same decisions as other people much the time, I can certainly understand how people come to (sometime vastly) different decisions than me.

EDIT: I have an uncle who is an emergency room doctor, and I guess after seeing all of those car crash victims, his car-buying decisions have always been based entirely on safety. So he's driven an otherwise unlikely progression of cars, some luxury, some not, based on whatever seemed to be the safest new car available.

Yeah, it's high time the adage "you get what you pay for" was amended: "You get at most what you pay for".

You know the $20 shoes won't be great, and sure, it's possible the $200 shoes will be better than the $20 ones...or they could be exactly the same.

> Does anyone else have difficulty understanding why anyone would pay this much for a car?

Not really. I mean I've never spent that much on a car and I'm not sure I ever will, but I did spent $5000 on a computer one time. That's an order of magnitude more than most people pay for computers, and while nice, it sure isn't 10x better than a $500 computer would have been. But I spent the $5k, because a) I had the money and b) I really really realllly wanted that computer.

EDIT: In case anyone is curious about the $5000 computer, it was this one back in 1999, and no, it was absolutely not worth it in the end: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_g3/specs/powerb...

> Among my friends that have bought houses, many of them have gone into significant debt just to buy a 3-4 bedroom house, even though they have no kids and only use one of the bedrooms, because they think that at some point in their life they will put them to use.

Are you sure your friends aren't just being rational? I thought about the rent vs buy thing pretty constantly in my 20s and always came down on the rent side. Not because renting Dwelling A would be cheaper than buying Dwelling A, but because I was happy living in Dwelling A (a nice-ish 1-bedroom apartment) but if I were to commit to ownership I'd want Dwelling B (at least 3 bedrooms). Life can change fast - you're not sure which fling will turn into a spouse or when a little one will come along or when you'll really need a home office. Selling a one-bedroom condo is obviously doable, but transaction costs are fairly insane on real estate, and it seems like low-end places (like 1-bed condos) haven't historically experienced the same appreciation as standard houses.

It sounds like your friends could get by with a Smart car but bought a Toyota RAV4 instead. And when they decide to trade up to a Tesla in a few years, they might find that the RAV4 retained value better than the Smart car, because that's what "everyone" wants!

You say mistake as if it were an intentional choice that turned out to be a bad one. I don't know my history of this subject very well, did policymakers really sit down and encourage homes to be treated as investment, leading them to become less affordable? Or were homes becoming less affordable just the natural consequence of having an expanding population and fixed supply of land? I'd always sort of assumed the latter.