More for Your Money
Economics is notoriously
imperfect in its assessment of human behavior. "If all the economists were laid
end to end," George Bernard Shaw once observed, "they would not reach a
conclusion." Economic terms and concepts, on the other hand, have been absorbed
into ordinary English by the dozens, mainly for their sheer descriptive power.
Gresham's Law ("bad money drives out good money") has been widely
applied to matters of culture and taste--for instance, in explanations of why
television is awash in vulgar programming. Laissez-faire is now used to
describe a variety of "anything-goes" regulatory regimes, whether in law or
child-rearing. Gold standard does duty for "the last word" in any field
of endeavor or line of consumer goods. Diminishing returns , economy
of scale , invisible hand , opportunity cost --all appear
commonly in noneconomic settings. There is a supply side , it seems, to
almost everything.
To this
list one can add a pair of complementary economic terms that is emerging from
strictly technical usage into everyday patois--the one an old standby that is
newly diversifying, the other its mirror image, just beginning to find a
public.
According to the textbooks, value-added is "the
amount of value added to a product by each stage of its production"--in other
words, the amount of value added as wood metamorphoses from tree to lumber to
house, or as oil is refined from its captured state into petrochemicals, and
thence, perhaps, into plastic. During the brief Steve Forbes epoch of the
Republican primary season, the idea of a "value-added tax" received
glancing attention. The tax, conceived around the time of World War I and now
in use across the European Community, is imposed on each increment of growth in
value during a commodity's industrial transformation.
In recent
years, the term value-added has dallied with marketing to produce a new
brood of connotations. In the food industry, value-added has long meant
"processed." Or, it can refer to any product that includes some special feature
or extra component. (A head of lettuce is not value-added , but
washed-and-cut lettuce in a plastic bag is. So is hamburger already made into
patties, or cheese that has been shredded, or 100-percent-pure orange juice
that comes in a container with a screw top.) Putting words such as "healthy,"
"lite," or "fresh" on a label can offer value-added cachet.
Outside the food industry, promotional tie-ins
of almost any kind are deemed value-added --T-shirts, tote bags,
contests, 800 numbers, Web sites, and all the other ingredients of the vast
commercial agglomeration known as "marketainment." Even values impart
value-added worth. Here is a blurb for the children's cartoon Big
Bag : " 'Big Bag' casts itself as a modern-day Aesop by focusing each
episode on honesty, cooperation, and other value-added themes."
Value-added may also have a future as a concept invoked to justify what
might otherwise seem like casual appropriation. A recent article in the
Columbia Journalism Review contained the following passage:
Senior editor Jerry
Adler says Newsweek often gets its ideas from 'little magazines' like The New
Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's, and 'with our reporting resources
we can package them for a larger market. ... There's some value-added in what
we do.'
When
Great Britain next comes under criticism for having absconded with the Elgin
Marbles from the Acropolis, we should expect their prominent display in the
British Museum to be brought up as part of a value-added defense.
The opposite of value-addition , of course, is
value-subtraction . In this process, the value of raw economic inputs is
not enhanced but somehow diminished with each step in its manufacturing or
marketing. Foreign-affairs analyst Edward Luttwak has illustrated the
phenomenon as it pertains to the manufacture of late-Marxist apparel:
Perfectly good Uzbek
cotton that had real value--it could be sold on the world market--was made into
shirts so ugly and poorly cut that not even Soviet consumers would buy them.
Hence all that spinning, weaving, dyeing, cutting, and sewing actually removed
value from the raw materials.
Although
the term value-subtracted has been used in specialized contexts for some
years, it is acquiring traction in public parlance largely because of
dislocations in the former Communist bloc. A 1992 study estimated that some 8
percent of Russia's industrial output at the time was being produced by
factories that even Russian analysts called value-subtractors . The study
noted that the collapse of value-subtracting industries can precipitate
an economic boon. By one estimate, Russia's economic output would more than
double if the Russians simply sold off their natural resources instead of
trying to make something out of them. ("That is why," the Economist
observed a few years ago, in its trademark tone of languorous hauteur, "when a
Russian steel factory reduces output, it is an achievement, not a pity.")
Look for value-subtracted to establish
itself in metaphorically expansive circumstances. Economist George Gilder now
speaks of America's cities as "centers of value subtraction"--parasites that
suck social and economic vitality from the rest of the country. Some management
consultants describe dysfunctional interactions with one's fellow workers as
value-subtracting behavior. Whatever they may be called in private,
customers who demand an inordinate amount of time, money, and morale (and we
have all stood behind them at the bank) have acquired the name
value-subtractors .
We nod to
the idea of value-subtraction whenever we fall back on Horace's phrase
about "laboring to bring forth a mouse," or lament the forests felled to make
possible a terrible book, or recollect an experience of working by committee.
The idea that value may decrease as a result of the very efforts made to
increase it is an essential part of human experience, and it will ensure
value-subtraction --in its value-added sense--a long and
distinguished career.
Afterthoughts and follow-up:
Some 40 readers responded to
the last "Good Word" column, on yadda yadda yadda . Two of them, Steve
Gelmis and Martin Zacks, independently remembered the expression from a Lenny
Bruce routine, which itself was a parody of dialogue in a prison movie. As
Gelmis remembers it, the expression comes up in exchanges that occur after a
prisoner named Rocky has precipitated a riot:
Warden: "Give it up,
Rocky!"Rocky: "Yadda, yadda, yadda , warden."Father Flotsky: "Domini,
domini, domini, you're all Catholics. OK, Rocky, now be a good boy and give
yourself up."Rocky: "Yadda, yadda, yadda , fadda."
Scott Pauw provided a reference to a song, "Yah-ta-ta,
Yah-ta-ta, Yah-ta-ta," recorded in 1945 by Judy Garland and Bing Crosby. ("The
theme of the song," he wrote, "is two people boring each other with talk, talk,
talk.") Various readers offered citations from the television shows The
Simpsons , Pearl , and Grace
Under
Fire . Eric
Fredericksen noted that expressions other than yadda yadda yadda used by
performers to generate "crowd chatter" in theater productions include
rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb; peas 'n' carrots, peas 'n' carrots, peas 'n'
carrots; and watermelon, watermelon, watermelon .
A number of people noted that
a phonetic yadda yadda , no etymological relation to the term under
discussion, is commonly heard in Japan as an expression roughly synonymous with
"yuck."
