https://youtu.be/KcAaLk0ngWw?si=CWGsYZ8q0wygDOW2
Postprandial -- Dewey lecture at Chicago Law -- interesting. The notion is that there are goods that people would pay to categorically eliminate (e.g., weddings, Barbie dolls), i.e., the commodity ultimately has a negative value, and yet the acceptance rate is high, and people might pay as individuals to acquire the good, given that everyone else is doing so.
The interesting thing for me, just based on what I'm thinking about now, is that it seems to confound the notion of the pragmatist 'cash value' (James) of political and social ideas. In other words, pragmatism says that the real meaning of our shared social speech is that it signals what it is that we're likely to do. Take weddings, for example. If socially, we talk about how wonderful they are, but the individual cash value of that talk is actually that the commodity has a negative value in each particular case, that shared social speech either has an inverse relationship to the actual value placed on the event, or the speech (belief) isn't governed by the individual's private valuation of the institution (object). Perhaps there's an inherent tension between shared speech and values, which are inherently normative (e.g., the village values weddings), and private intentions, which are keyed to actual personal value and intended behavior. (And I don't know that pragmatism easily accounts for the first case.)