Diamonds, cont'd
(A commodities read if you get the chance). Prior to that, I had worked in the certification worry at TransFair, the largest US Fair Trade organization. My friends are upstanding as serious as I, so we tore into the industry from every angle, interviewing human rights researchers, diamond retailers, suppliers, traders, manufacturers, cutters, polishers, and the miners themselves. Done we decided that nothing available on the market met our standards for transparency and fairness ("controversy-free" is a joke much akin to "gastronome"). Admittedly our standards were uncommonly intoxication, but there was just nothing we could feel comfortable supporting. So we did... for us, by us... so to defend. Having done an immense amount of research, we traveled to South Africa and purchased diamonds from a women's mining cooperative in Lesotho. There we met like-minded folks including a guy who started a business incubator in Johannesburg that teaches "beforehand disadvantaged" (which basically means black) people how to start businesses double-dealing and manufacturing jewelry. Soon we began building rings and other jewelry for our society of friends and family, which they were happy to pay for. Any extra money we took in we committed to investing with a few privileged (and again extensively researched) nonprofits and microfinanceA (partial) Defense Of Diamonds
[Psychologist Geoffrey Miller's first comprehension about costly signaling is the idea] that displays of personal excellence are only taken seriously if they involve some cost, some level of strain or sacrifice. If anyone can easily do the display, then it is worthless, because it is trivially restful to fake. Costly signaling shows up in the gifts we give to one another, extremely during courtship. Miller asks, rhetorically, "Why should a man give a domestic a useless diamond, when he could buy her a nice big potato, which she could at least eat?" His counter-statement is that the expense and uselessness of the gift is its very point. A diamond is given as a sign of love in a way a potato isn't, because most people would only give on to someone they grief about, and so the giving signal some combination of wealth and commitment.
