Welcome to Econ Talk brought to you by the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your

host, Russ Roberts of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

My guest today is Virginia Postrell, a creative and engaging author and thinker on a host

of topics including culture and economics, an unusual combination. She's the author of

the future in its enemies and the substance of style. She writes the culture and commerce

column for the Atlantic and blogs regularly at dinamist.com. Virginia, welcome to Econ Talk.

Great to be with you. Your latest book was The Substance of Style. The title seems like

an oxymoron. The style to many people has little substance. What did you have in mind

with that title and tell us what the book's about? Well, the book is about two things. It

starts with an observation of a trend which is that aesthetics, the look and feel of people

places and things is increasingly important in our economy and culture. It's increasingly

important as the source of economic value and that reflects certain cultural tendencies

as well as a number of technological and economic developments. Starting from that point, the

book then seeks to examine why it is that consumers find style or aesthetics a genuine

source of value. There is a longstanding cultural critique that essentially says that any

concern with surfaces of things and particularly a willingness to pay more for mere packaging is

a sign of delusion manipulation, deception. While it is certainly possible to put something

of low quality in a pretty package, that is not, I argue, what is happening in our economy

today. In fact, the increasing importance of aesthetics is in many ways the direct result

of very high quality in the traditional sense of reliability and function. That what we have

is in fact another dimension of quality being added, that quality in the sense of that

which consumers value. What the substance of style does is look at what is it that people

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