With the cost of pretty much everything on the rise lately, I've been thinking a lot

about how price tags and quality relate to each other, or sometimes don't.

So recently, my podcasting colleague and former teacher, economist Steve Levitt, told me

a story that he'd told on Frekenomics Radio way back in 2010, called Do More Expensive

Taste Better. He gave me the short version. So, Bobo, I was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society

Fellows, which is an amazing opportunity. It's three years as a young researcher, no obligations,

except to shop to fancy dinners and to a weekly wine tasting that's your total obligation.

And they have this enormous budget for wine. I don't care about wine. I can't tell a good wine

from a bad wine. So, being an economist, I said, hey, why don't we do a blind wine tasting once

just to be a lot of fun? And they said, oh, that would be fun. Why don't we go ahead and do that?

What they didn't know is that I had a trick up my sleeve.

The wine seller that we kept had all the very fancy wines, then I had our wine steward

pick out some excellent examples of some particular variety. And then on the way to the wine tasting,

I bought the cheapest bottle of wine I could find at the liquor store of that same kind of great.

He put that cheap wine into one decanter. He put a fancy wine in another decanter,

and then he put a second fancy wine into two of the other decenters. These were now identical.

So, all together, four decenters, three wines. And then I had people taste each of those four

decenters and make comments about how good it was. The Harvard Fellows sniffed and sipped.

I imagine they savored, they swirled, they contemplated a whole range of appropriate adjectives,

and then they wrote down their reviews and ratings for each of the four decenters.

And so then I quickly went in the other room and I crunched the numbers. And it turned out

that these wine snops, not only did they not have preferences for the expensive wine,

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