Why we value what we make.

The behavioural economist Dan Ariely did a series of experiments on what is known as the IKEA effect,

or why we overvalue what we make.

The name, of course, comes from the store that sells self-assembly furniture. For practically challenged

people like me, putting an item of furniture together is usually like doing a giant jigsaw

puzzle in which various pieces are missing and others are in the wrong place. But in the end,

even if the item is amateurish, we tend to feel

a certain pride in it. We can say, I made this, even if someone else designed it, produced the

pieces, and wrote the instructions. There is about something in which we have invested our labour, a feeling like

that expressed in Psalm 128. When you eat the fruit of the labour of your hands, you will be

happy and it will go well with you. Ariely wanted to test the reality and extent of this added value, so he got volunteers to make

origami models by elaborately folding paper. He then asked them how much they were prepared to pay

to keep their own model. The average answer was 25 cents.

He asked other people in the vicinity what they would be prepared to pay.

The average answer was five cents.

In other words, people were prepared to pay five times as much

for something they had made themselves.

His conclusions were, the effort that we put into

something does not just change the object, it changes us and the way we evaluate that object,

and the greater the labour, the greater the love for what we have made. This is part of what is happening in the long sequence about the building of the sanctuary

that begins in our parcia and continues with few interruptions to the end of the book.

There's no comparison whatsoever between the Mishkan, the Holy and the Holy of Holies, and something as secular

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