March 2026In the early 1970s disaster struck the Swiss watch industry. Now people call it the quartz crisis, but in fact it was a compound of three separate disasters that all happened at about the…
March 2026In the early 1970s disaster struck the Swiss watch industry. Now people call it the quartz crisis, but in fact it was a compound of three separate disasters that all happened at about the same time.The first was competition from Japan. The Swiss had been watching the Japanese in the rear view mirror all through the 1960s, and they'd been improving at an alarming rate. But even so the Swiss were surprised in 1968 when the Japanese swept all the top spots for mechanical watches at the Geneva Observatory trials.The Swiss knew what was coming. For years the Japanese had been able to make cheaper watches. Now they could make better ones too.
To make matters worse, Swiss watches were about to become much more expensive. The Bretton Woods agreement, which since 1945 had fixed the exchange rates of most of the world's currencies, had set the Swiss Franc at an artificially low rate of .228 USD. When Bretton Woods collapsed in 1973, the Franc shot upward. By 1978 it reached .625 USD, meaning Swiss watches were now 2.7 times as expensive for Americans to buy. [1]
The combined effect of foreign competition and the loss of their protective exchange rate would have decimated the Swiss watch industry even if it hadn't been for quartz movements. But quartz movements were the final blow. Now the whole game they'd been trying to win at became irrelevant. Something that had been expensive — knowing the exact time — was now a commodity.Between the early 1970s and the early 1980s, unit sales of Swiss watches fell by almost two thirds. Most Swiss watchmakers became insolvent or close to it and were sold. But not all of them. A handful survived as independent companies. And the way they did it was by transforming themselves from precision instrument makers into luxury brands.In the process the nature of the mechanical watch was also transformed. The most expensive watches have always cost a lot, but why they cost a lot and what buyers got in return have changed completely. In 1960 expensive watches cost a lot because they cost a lot to manufacture, and what the buyer got in return was the most accurate timekeeping device, for its size, that could be made. Now they cost a lot because brands spend a lot on advertising and use tricks to limit supply, and what the buyer gets in return is an expensive status symbol.That turns out to be a profitable business though. The Swiss watch industry probably makes more now from selling brand than they would have if they were still selling engineering. And indeed, when you look at the graph of Swiss watch sales by revenue, it tells a different story than the graph of unit sales. Instead of falling off a cliff, the revenue numbers merely flatten out for a while, and then take off like a rocket in the late 1980s as the surviving watchmakers come to terms with their new destiny.It took the watchmakers about 20 years to figure out the new rules of the game. And it's interesting to watch them do it, because the completeness of their transformation makes it the perfect case study in one of the most powerful forces of our era: brand.Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear. But making the substantive differences between products disappear is what technology naturally tends to do. So what happened to the Swiss watch industry is not merely an interesting outlier. It's very much a story of our times.Jaeger-LeCoultre's web site says that one of their current collections "takes its inspiration from the classic designs of the golden age of watchmaking." In saying this they're implicitly saying something that present-day watchmakers all know but rarely come so close to saying outright: whatever age we're in now, it's not the golden age.The golden age was from 1945 to 1970 — from the point where the watch industry emerged from the chaos of war with the Swiss on top till the triple cataclysm that struck it starting in the late 60s. There were two things watchmakers sought above all in the golden age: thinness and accuracy. And indeed this was arguably the essential tradeoff in watchmaking. A watch is something you carry with you to tell you the time. So there are two fundamental ways to improve it: to make it easier to carry with you and to make it better at telling the time.Obviously accuracy is valuable, but in the golden age thinness was if anything more valuable. Even in the days of pocket watches the best watchmakers tried to make their watches as thin as they could. Cheap, thick pocket watches were derided as "turnips." But thinness took on a new urgency when men's watches moved onto their wrists during World War I. And since thinness was more difficult to achieve than accuracy, it was this quality that tended to distinguish the more expensive watches of the golden age.There is one other thing watchmakers have pursued in some eras: telling more than the time in the usual way. Telling you the phase of the moon, for example, or telling the time with sound. In the industry the term for these things is "complications." They were popular in the nineteenth century and they're popular again now, but except for one pragmatic complication (showing the date), they were a sideshow in the golden age. In the golden age, as always in golden ages, the top watchmakers focused on the essential tradeoff. And, as always in golden ages, they did it beautifully. The best watches of the golden age have a quiet perfection that has never been equalled since. And for reasons I'm about to explain, probably never will be.
The three most prestigious brands of the golden age were the so-called "holy trinity" of Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, and Audemars Piguet. Their prestige was mostly deserved; they had earned it by the exceptional quality of their work. By the 1960s they stood on two legs, prestige and performance. And what they learned in the next two decades was that they had to put all their weight on the first leg, because they could no longer win at either of the two things watchmakers had historically striven to achieve. Quartz movements were not only more accurate than any mechanical movement, but thinner too.The holy trinity at least had another leg to stand on. Most of the other well-known Swiss watchmakers sold only performance. None of those companies survived intact.Omega showed what not to do. Omega were the nerds of Swiss watchmakers. They made wonderfully accurate watches, but they would have been ambivalent, at best, about the idea of being a luxury brand. When the Japanese got as good as the Swiss at making accurate movements, Omega responded in the Omega way: make even more accurate movements. They introduced a new movement in 1968 that ran at a 45% higher frequency. In theory this should have made it more accurate, but the new movement was so fragile that it destroyed their reputation for reliability. They even tried to make a better quartz movement, but there was nothing down that road but a race to the bottom. By 1981 they were insolvent and were taken over by their creditors.Patek Philippe took the opposite approach. While Omega was redesigning their movements, Patek was redesigning their cases. Or more precisely, designing their cases, because until then they hadn't.This is probably the point to mention what a strange beast the Swiss watch industry was in those days. It was a kind of capitalism that's hard to imagine today, and even then could only have been made to work in a country like Switzerland — a network of small, specialized companies locked into place by regulation. The companies that we for convenience have been calling watchmakers were merely the consumer-facing edge of this network. The holy trinity didn't design their own cases, or even their own movements most of the time.In 1968 (that year again) Patek Philippe launched a new watch that shifted the center of gravity of case design. This time they'd taken their own designs to the casemakers and said "this is what you're going to make for us." The result was a striking new model called the Golden Ellipse. Somewhat confusingly, because it wasn't elliptical. The new case was more of what UI designers would call a round rect: a rectangle with rounded corners. And this new family of watches was quite successful. But it was more than that: it was the pattern for the future. [2]
How could merely designing a distinctive case be so important? Because it turned the entire watch into an expression of brand.The trouble with the best watches of the golden age, from the point of view of someone who wanted to impress people with the brand of watch he was wearing, was that no one could tell what brand of watch you were wearing. Until you got within a few inches of them, the watches of all the top makers looked the same. That's the thing about minimalism: there tends to be just one answer. Plus the watches of the golden age were small by present standards. Watchmakers had spent centuries working to make them smaller, and by 1960 they'd gotten very good at it. So the only thing distinguishing one top brand from another was the name printed on the dial, and dials were so small that these names were tiny. The manufacturers' names on the holy trinity's golden age watches are between half and three quarters of a millimeter high. So by taking over the case, Patek expanded the size of the brand from 8 square millimeters to 800.Why did they suddenly decide to make their brand shout, after a century of whispering? Because they knew they weren't going to beat the Japanese on performance. From now on they'd have to depend more on brand.There's a cost to doing this, which we can see even in this early example of case-as-brand. Golden Ellipses are not bad looking. They must have looked even cooler in the 1970s, when designers were turning everything into round rects. But the Golden Ellipse was not an evolutionary step forward in case design. Watches didn't all become round rects. Watchmakers had already discovered the optimal shape for the case of something that describes a circle as it rotates.They had also discovered the optimal shape for the crown, the knob on the side of a watch that you turn to wind it. But to emphasize the distinctive profile of the Ellipse, Patek made the crown too small, with the result that they're distractingly hard to wind. [3]
So even in this early example we see an important point about the relationship between brand and design. Branding isn't merely orthogonal to good design, but opposed to it. Branding by definition has to be distinctive. But good design, like math or science, seeks the right answer, and right answers tend to converge.Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal.There is some wiggle room here of course. Design doesn't have as sharply defined right answers as math, especially design meant for a human audience. So it's not necessarily bad design to do something distinctive if you have honest motives. But you can't evade the fundamental conflict between branding and design, any more than you can evade gravity.Indeed, the conflict between branding and design is so fundamental that it extends far beyond things we call design. We see it even in religion. If you want the adherents of a religion to have customs that set them apart from everyone else, you can't make them do things that are convenient or reasonable, or other people would do them too. If you want to set your adherents apart, you have to make them do things that are inconvenient and unreasonable.It's the same if you want to set your designs apart. If you choose good options, other people will choose them too.There are only two ways to combine branding and good design. You can do it when the space of possibilities is enormously large, as it is in painting for example. Leonardo could paint as well as he possibly could and yet also paint in a style that was distinctively his. If there had been a million painters as good as Bellini and Leonardo this would have been harder to do, but since there were more like ten they didn't bump up against one another much. [4]
The other situation when branding and good design can be combined is when the space of possibilities is comparatively unexplored. If you're the first to arrive in some new territory, you can both find the right answer and claim it as uniquely yours. At least at first; if you've really found the right answer, everyone else's designs will inevitably converge on yours, and your brand advantage will erode over time.Since the space of watch design is neither unexplored nor enormously large, branding can only be achieved at the expense of good design. And in fact if you wanted one sentence to describe the current age of watchmaking, that one would do pretty well.Patek Philippe didn't know for sure that making visibly branded watches would work. It was not even their only strategy, at the time. They were finding their way. But it was the strategy that did work, at least as measured by revenues.For it to work the customers had to meet them halfway. Patek knew that not all their customers were buying their watches for the performance they delivered — for their accuracy and thinness. They knew that at least some customers were buying them because they were expensive. But it was unclear how many, or how far they could be pushed.To encourage them, Patek did something that none of the holy trinity had done much of before: brand advertising. And what they talked about was how expensive their watches were. A 1968 Patek ad explained "why you are well advised to invest perhaps half a month's income" in an Ellipse. "Like every Patek Philippe," the ad continued, "this thin model is entirely finished by hand. Since a Patek Philippe is the costliest watch to make, production is severely limited: only 43 watches are signed out each day for delivery to prominent jewelers throughout the world." [5]
You can tell this is an early ad because they still mention thinness. But there is no mention of accuracy. Presumably Patek felt that battle was already lost.The next move was made by Audemars Piguet, who in 1970 commissioned the renowned designer G�rald Genta to design their own iconic watch, this one, daringly, in steel. The result, launched in 1972, was the Royal Oak. And Audemars Piguet's ads (for they too now started doing brand advertising) emphasized its high cost even more dramatically. "Introducing steel at the price of gold," one began. "You're looking at the costliest stainless steel watch in the world — the Audemars Piguet 'Royal Oak'. What makes it even more precious than gold is the time that went into building it, by a vanishing breed of master watchmakers." At the bottom of the ad they turn the traditional formula on its head and describe their watches as being "priced from $35,000 and down."
The Royal Oak was also a step forward in surface area devoted to brand. The Golden Ellipse had turned the watch face into an expression of brand, but it used ordinary straps and bracelets. In the Royal Oak, the watch face was integrated with a metal bracelet that continued its design all the way around the wrist. When it said "You're looking at the costliest stainless steel watch in the world," it said it with every square millimeter of surface area.Would customers buy this new approach? The initial results were moderately encouraging. The holy trinity's sales didn't take off, but they didn't go down to zero either. There were at least some people out there responding to the new message. Perhaps if they kept at it the number would grow.So they did. Encouraged by the success of the Royal Oak, Patek Philippe commissioned G�rald Genta in 1974 to design a similar watch for them. The design of the Royal Oak had been inspired by a ship's porthole, so the design of this new watch would be inspired by... a ship's porthole. It was called the Nautilus, and it launched at the Basel Watch Fair in 1976.
In the Nautilus we really see the incompatibility of branding and design. It was huge. The most expensive men's watches at the peak of the golden age were typically 32 or 33 millimeters in diameter. The Nautilus was 42 millimeters. And as well as being huge it had gratuitous knobs on either side of the face, like a pair of ears. But you could recognize one from across the room.Of all the watches Patek makes now, the Nautilus is the most sought after. It's perfectly aligned with what present-day buyers want — basically, the loudest possible expression of brand. But in 1976 it was ahead of its time. In 1976 it was still a little too much.The watch that finally turned Patek's fortunes around was another iconic design, the hobnail calatrava. The hobnail calatravas were so called because they were decorated with tiny pyramid-shaped spikes. That was enough to make them look distinctive. But except for the hobnails they were basically golden age dress watches.The hobnail calatrava was apparently the brainchild of Ren� Bittel, the head of Patek Philippe's ad agency. It was not a new design. Many watchmakers had decorated their cases with hobnails over the years, and there had been a Patek model with them since 1968. But in 1984 Bittel told Patek president Philippe Stern, in effect: make this your standard design, and I'll create an ad campaign to identify it in people's heads with your brand. [6]
It worked spectacularly well. The resulting watch, the 3919, is known as the "banker's watch" because it became so popular among investment bankers in New York in the 80s and 90s. Up to this point Patek had been hedging their bets, making quartz watches as well, and arguing defensively in their ads that quartz watches in fancy cases were almost as laborious to make as mechanical ones. But the ibankers bought the full mechanical story. They didn't even need self-winding mechanical watches; the 3919 was hand-wound. So be it. Patek stopped talking about quartz movements. And their sales, which had been flat since the early 70s, were by 1987 on a clear upward trajectory that has continued to this day.
It's hard to say for sure whether the critical ingredient was Bittel's skill at advertising or a receptive audience, but as someone who knew these investment bankers, I'd lean toward the audience. These were the people for whom the term "yuppy" was coined. Living expensively was one of the things they were best known for. If anyone was going to adopt a new way to display wealth, it would be them. Whereas if Bittel had sent the same message ten years earlier, there might have been no one to hear it.Whatever the cause, something happened in the second half of the 1980s, because that's when all the numbers finally start going up again. Up till about 1985 it was still not clear what would happen with mechanical watches. By 1990 it was. By 1990 the custom of using expensive, highly-branded, conspicuously mechanical watches as status symbols was firmly established. [7]
Obsolete technologies don't usually get adopted as ways to display wealth. Why did it happen with mechanical watches? Because the wristwatch turns out to be the perfect vehicle for it. Where better than right on your wrist, where everyone can see it? And more to the point, what better to do it with? You could wear a diamond ring or a gold chain, but those would have seemed socially dubious to investment bankers. They might have been barbarians, but they weren't mafia. Whereas nothing could be more legit than a gold watch. The chairman of the company was still wearing one his wife gave him 20 years ago, before quartz watches were even a thing. If the increasing pressure to display wealth was going to emerge anywhere, this was the place. [8]
For men, at least. Women never really went for the idea of wearing mechanical watches. Most rich women are happy wearing a Cartier tank with a quartz movement. Why the difference? Partly for the same reason that most buyers of steam engines are men. But the main reason is that expensive mechanical watches now serve as de facto jewelry for men, and women don't need de facto jewelry because they can wear actual jewelry.It was critical, though, that mechanical watches were accurate enough. A new 3919 would have been off by no more than 5 seconds a day. That was nowhere near as good as quartz. Even the cheapest mass market quartz watches were accurate to half a second a day, and the best ones were accurate to 3 seconds a year. But in practice you didn't need that kind of accuracy. If mechanical watches had only been accurate to a minute a day they couldn't have made the leap from keeping time to displaying wealth. It would have seemed too manifestly unluxurious to have a watch that always had the wrong time. But 5 seconds a day was close enough. [9]
This is an important point about the relationship between brand and quality. Quality doesn't stop mattering when a product switches to something people buy for its brand. But the way it matters changes shape. It becomes a threshold. It no longer has to be so great that it sells the product; brand sells the product; but it does have to be good enough to maintain the brand's reputation. The brand must not break character.It was a lucky thing for the watchmakers that yuppies arose just in time to save them. Or maybe not so lucky. Because the evolution of the market that yuppies represented has continued with a vengeance, and watchmakers have perforce been dragged along with it. If they don't make gigantic blingy watches for buyers in Hong Kong and Dubai, someone else will. So that is what they now find themselves doing. And what began with a few comparatively subtle examples of the conflict between branding and design is now an all out war on design.
The present era of mechanical watchmaking doesn't yet have a name. But if we need one, it's obvious what it should be: the brand age. The golden age ran from 1945 to 1970, followed by the quartz crisis from 1970 to 1985. Since 1985 we've been in the brand age.This won't be the only brand age. Indeed, it's not even the first; fine art has been in its own brand age since the establishment of the Barr canon in the 1930s. And since we'll probably see more of this kind of thing, it would be worth taking some time to look at what a brand age is like.How are things different now from the way they were in the golden age? The best way to answer that might be to imagine what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine.The first thing he'd notice, if he walked through a fancy shopping district, is that all the prominent watchmakers of the golden age seem to be doing better than ever. They're not only all still around, but most now have their own boutiques instead of depending on jewelers to sell their products as they used to back in the day.In fact this is an illusion. Only three watchmakers survived the dark days of the 70s and 80s as independent companies: Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, and Rolex. All the rest are owned by six holding companies, which reinflated them as it became clear that mechanical watches would have a second life as luxury accessories for men. Instead of separate companies they're now more like the brands that got rolled up into the big three American automakers: they're ways for their parent companies to target different segments of the market. So Longines, for example, no longer competes with Omega, because the company that owns them both has assigned it a lower tier of the market. [10]
There's a reason the Vacheron Constantin boutique looks so much like the IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre boutiques, and for that matter the Montblanc and Cartier boutiques. They're all owned by the same company. It's similar with clothing brands, incidentally. When you walk through a town's fanciest shopping district, what seem to be the shops of lots of different brands are actually owned by a handful of conglomerates. That's one reason these districts seem so sterile; like suburbs built by a single developer, they have an unnatural lack of variety.When our time traveler peered into the windows of these shops, the first thing he'd notice was how large all the watches were. This would surprise him, because in the golden age, as indeed in all the preceding centuries, big meant cheap. An expensive golden age men's watch might have been 33 millimeters in diameter and 8 millimeters thick. An expensive watch today will be more like 42 millimeters in diameter and 10 millimeters thick — more than double the size. It would astonish our visitor to look through the windows of what were clearly very fancy shops and see what seemed to be cheap watches. [11]
We know how this happened. When watches switched from telling time to telling brand, they grew in size to be better at it. And not just in size, but in shape too. That's another thing our time traveler would notice: the surprising variety of strange case shapes and awkward protrusions that have been produced as the centrifugal tendency of branding played out. What, he'd wonder, is going on with the huge guards on the crowns of those Panerais? What do people do with these watches that makes the crown need such protection? And why would a crown guard have a message engraved on it saying that it's a registered trademark? It's obvious to us what's going on here, but imagine how confusing it would be to someone from the golden age, when form followed function. [12]
As he puzzled over this strange assortment of bulky watches, he'd notice a further pattern. He'd realize that a surprisingly large number of them looked like a specific brand of bulky watch he was already familiar with.I haven't talked about Rolex so far, because Rolex didn't have to do much to adapt to the new era. They already had one foot in the brand age during the golden age. Early in their history they put a lot of effort into making their watches better, but they "stopped taking part in competitions in Geneva and Neuch�tel at the end of the 1950s," and from about 1960 "largely abandoned research into mechanical watchmaking." [13] The reason was not that they'd become lazy, but that they'd discovered they could make sales grow faster by marketing their watches as status symbols. So that became their focus during the 1960s, and by the time the quartz crisis hit ten years later, their customers were self-selected to be people who didn't care that much what was inside a watch, so long as it was recognizably a Rolex.
And they were far ahead of other watchmakers in that department. They already had in the 1940s what we saw Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet struggling to create in the 1970s and 80s: a case that immediately proclaimed the brand of the maker. The Rolex look seems to have evolved organically, but once it did, they realized how important it was. In fact they pitched it as one of the features of their watches. A 1960s Rolex ad says "You can recognize its classic shape, carved out of a block of solid gold, from the other end of the conference table."Indeed Rolex was ahead of its time in both dimensions: their cases were not merely recognizable, but big too, at least by golden age standards. That was not the result of clever marketing, though. It was a byproduct of the founder Hans Wilsdorf's obsession with building waterproof watches.As its name suggests, that was the raison d'etre of the Rolex Oyster. Watches like the Oyster were designed to be tough, like Jeeps. In the golden age there were two poles of watch design. At one end were tool watches, which were thick, tough, and usually made of steel. At the other end were dress watches, which were thin, elegant, and usually made of gold. But Rolex blurred the line between them. When they made thick, tough watches, they made them out of gold as well as steel. The result was a sort of luxury Jeep. And if that phrase didn't ring a bell in your head, stop and think about it, because that is exactly what everyone is driving now. That's what SUVs are, luxury Jeeps. What happened to watches is the same thing that happened to cars. And indeed if our time traveler turned and saw a Porsche Cayenne pass by and realized what it was — a huge, pseudo-offroad vehicle meant to recall the Porsche 911 — he might have been even more shocked than he was by the watches he'd been looking at. [14]
If the time traveller walked into a Patek Philippe boutique and actually tried to buy a Nautilus, he'd get the biggest shock of all. They wouldn't sell him one. Because at Patek he'd encounter the most extreme brand age phenomenon: artificial scarcity. You can't just buy a Nautilus. You have to spend years proving your loyalty first by buying your way through multiple tiers of other models, and then spend years on a waiting list. [15]
Obviously this strategy sells more watches. But it also supports retail prices by keeping watches off the secondary market. A company using artificial scarcity to drive sales can't allow too many of the scarce models to leak into the secondary market, or they stop being scarce. The ideal is the watch equivalent of carbon sequestration: for the people who buy their watches to keep them till they die.To push the market toward this ideal, Patek squeezes from both sides of the sale. They weed out flippers by making the path to the scarce models so costly in both time and money — so inconvenient and unreasonable — that only a genuine fan would endure it. The lower tier watches sell for below retail on the secondary market, because Patek doesn't restrict their supply, so a would-be flipper should have to spend years making money-losing purchases before he could even get something he could flip at a profit. Apparently some people still manage to beat this system though, so Patek's countermeasures don't end there. They keep a vigilant eye on secondary sales to see who's selling their watches. Auction listings usually include serial numbers, so those are easy to trace, but if necessary they'll rebuy their own watches on the secondary market to get the serial number and trace the leak. They buy hundreds a year. And when they catch someone selling watches they don't want them to, they don't just cut off that customer. If a retailer's customers are responsible for too many such leaks, they'll cut off the whole retailer. Which naturally makes retailers eager to help them police buyers.
There will of course always be some leaks into the secondary market. Even the most loyal customers die at a certain rate. And in fact it's critical for Patek that the secondary market continue to exist, because it's one of the most valuable sources of information they have about the most important question they face: how fast to increase the supply of the top tier watches. Their scarcity helps drive the purchases of all the others, so those that do make it into the secondary market should always sell for above retail. And I'm sure Patek leaves a large margin for error when increasing supply, because if secondary market prices for these watches get close to retail prices, you're getting close to a price collapse — which, since people now buy these watches as investments, would have the same disastrous cascading effect as the bursting of an asset bubble. It wouldn't just be like the bursting of an asset bubble. It would be the bursting of an asset bubble. That's the business an elite watchmaker is in now: carefully managing a sustained asset bubble. [16]
This is an instance of what I call the comb-over effect: when a series of individually small changes takes you from something that's a little bit off to something that's freakishly wrong. I'm sure Patek didn't cook up this whole scheme in one shot; I'm sure it evolved gradually. But look at what a strange place we've ended up in. Back in the golden age the way you bought a Patek Philippe was to go to a jeweler and give them money. Now Patek is policing buyers to maintain an asset bubble.The most striking thing to me about the brand age is the sheer strangeness of it. The zombie watch brands that appear to be independent and even have their own retail stores, and yet are all owned by a few holding companies. The giant, awkwardly shaped watches that reverse 500 years of progress in making them smaller. The business model that requires a company to rebuy their own watches on the secondary market to catch rogue customers. The very concept of rogue customers. It's all so strange. And the reason it's strange is that there's no function for form to follow.Up to the end of the golden age, mechanical watches were necessary. You needed them to know the time. And that constraint gave both the watches and the watchmaking industry a meaningful shape. There were certainly some strange-looking watches made during the golden age. They weren't all beautifully minimal. But when golden age watchmakers made a strange-looking watch, they knew they were doing it. In fact they give the impression of having done it as a deliberate exercise, to avoid getting into a rut.That's not why brand age watches look strange. Brand age watches look strange because they have no practical function. Their function is to express brand, and while that is certainly a constraint, it's not the clean kind of constraint that generates good things. The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it's going to be a weird, bad world.Well that was dark. Is there some edifying lesson we can salvage from the wreckage?One obvious lesson is to stay away from brand. Indeed it's probably a good idea not just to avoid buying brand, but to avoid selling it too. Sure, you might be able to make money this way — though I bet it's harder than it looks — but pushing people's brand buttons is just not a good problem to work on, and it's hard to do good work without a good problem.The more subtle lesson is that fields have natural rhythms that are beyond the power of individuals to resist. Fields have golden ages and not so golden ages, and you're much more likely to do good work in a field that's on the way up.Of course they don't call them golden ages as they're happening. "Golden age" is a term people use later, after they're over. That doesn't mean that golden ages aren't real, but rather that their participants take them for granted at the time. They don't know how good they have it. But while it's usually a mistake to take one's good fortune for granted, it's not in this case. What a golden age feels like, at the time, is just that smart people are working hard on interesting problems and getting results. It would be overfitting to optimize for more than that.In fact there's a single principle that will both save you from working on things like brand, and also automatically find golden ages for you. Follow the problems.The way to find golden ages is not to go looking for them. The way to find them — the way almost all their participants have found them historically — is by following interesting problems. If you're smart and ambitious and honest with yourself, there's no better guide than your taste in problems. Go where interesting problems are, and you'll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they'll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.Notes
[1] The Bretton Woods agreement didn't fix exchange rates between currencies directly. It fixed each relative to gold. Obviously this also fixed them relative to one another.
[2] The Golden Ellipse isn't quite a round rect, because the sides aren't quite flat. It's similar in shape to the superellipses popularized by Piet Hein in the early 1960s, and in fact that may be where they got the name. But mathematically it's not an actual superellipse. My guess is that Patek's designer just experimented with French curves till he got something he liked. And to be fair it is a good shape.
[3] It was ironic that Patek Philippe of all companies made this mistake, because Adrien Philippe was the inventor of the modern crown. But they must have realized what they'd done, because later Ellipses have if anything excessively prominent crowns.
[4] The high ratio of design space to practitioners in fine art has combined with the practical importance of attribution to give people the impression that painting in a distinctively Leonardesque way is what makes Leonardo good. The most dangerous problem faced by curators, art historians, and art dealers — the one that has the worst consequences if they get the wrong answer — is attribution. So inevitably they spend a lot of time thinking and talking about the features that distinguish the work of one artist from another. But those aren't what make artists good. What makes the line of a woman's cheek in a Leonardo drawing good is how good it looks as the line of a cheek, not how little it looks like lines made by other artists.
Because painting has such prestige, the myth that having a distinctive style (rather than painting well) is the defining quality of great artists has in turn given cover to a lot of bad design in adjacent fields. A brand that does something hideous to distinguish their products can say "Like all great works of art, ours have a distinctive style," and people will buy it.[5] An ad that Patek Philippe ran in America in 1970 famously described a Patek 3548 with a gold bracelet as a "$1700 trust fund." Was it actually a good investment? In the very best case a dealer might pay you $20k now for one in unworn condition with its original box and papers. That's about a 4.5% rate of return, which is not absolutely terrible. But apparently the average rate of return on S&P 500 stocks over this period was more like 10%, if you reinvested all the dividends after paying taxes on them. The average rate of return would have been over 9% if you merely bought a lump of gold that hadn't been made into a watch. So, not surprisingly, the ad wasn't very good investment advice.
[6] Tania Edwards, who ran US marketing for Patek Philippe in the 90s, said that Bittel literally sketched the design of the 3919 on a piece of paper. This sounds odd to me, because the 3919 looked exactly like the existing 3520 with the addition of sub seconds (a small dial with a second hand above 6 o'clock). Why would you sketch a design almost identical to an existing watch when you could just point to the existing watch and say "that, with sub seconds." What this story does show, though, is the degree to which people within Patek felt their ad agency was responsible for the design of the 3919.
[7] If I had to date the turning point for mechanical watches precisely, I'd say 1986. Unit sales of Swiss watches rebounded in 1985, but revenue didn't, which means what we're seeing is the boom in cheap quartz Swatches. Indeed, sales of mechanical watches must have been down if revenue was flat despite the sale of all those Swatches. Whereas in 1986 revenue turns sharply upward even though unit sales only increase by a little, which implies a corresponding increase in sales of expensive mechanical watches.
[8] There is of course another reason some people are into mechanical watches: because they're interested in old technology. And if you are genuinely interested in mechanical watches, there's good news. You don't have to wear a billboard on your wrist or pay a lot to own one. Just buy golden age watches. They still keep good time, they're much more beautiful, and they cost a fraction of what new watches cost.
The key to buying a golden age watch is to find a good dealer, and the best way to recognize one is by how much they tell you about the watch. A bad dealer will just have a lot of fluff about the prestige of the brand and the sleek lines of the case. A good dealer will tell you the model number of the watch and movement, have lots of pictures, including some with the case back open, give you dimensions, disclose all damage and restoration, and tell you exactly how accurately the watch is running. Good dealers tend to be watch nerds themselves, so they're into this kind of thing.(There are a few independent watchmakers trying earnestly to make good mechanical watches now, but their efforts show how hard it is to do good work when the current is against you.)[9] Oddly enough it might have helped that the 3919 was hand wound. If a watch runs for long enough, 5 seconds a day starts to add up. After three months a watch that gains 5 seconds a day will be 7 minutes fast. But with a hand wound watch you occasionally forget to wind it, and it runs down. And when you wind it again you reset it — on average to a time about 30 seconds behind the actual time. So if you forgot to wind a 3919 every two weeks or so, it would rarely have shown the wrong time.
[10] There's one brand still waiting to be reinflated: Universal Gen�ve, which was one of the big players of the golden age but since 1977 has been little more than a brand name passed from acquirer to acquirer. They're scheduled to come back to life later this year, no doubt with stories about their long tradition of watchmaking.
[11] More precisely, a high ratio of size to accuracy meant cheap. It's easier to make a larger movement keep good time, but between two watches of the same accuracy, the larger was usually the cheaper.
[12] Their form did once follow function. They were originally diving watches. But they're long since obsolete for this purpose. Present day diving watches (now called dive computers) are digital and tell you much more than the time.
[13] Rolex was awarded an average of 16.6 patents per year in the 1950s, but only 1.7 per year in the 1960s.
Pierre-Yves Donz�, The Making of a Status Symbol: A Business History of Rolex, Manchester University Press, 2025.
[14] Rolexes also shared something more specific with SUVs: aspirational manliness. An internal 1967 report by Rolex's ad agency J. Walter Thompson explained the idea they were trying to convey: "Because a Rolex is designed for any situation, however rough or dangerous or heroic or exalted, it implies that the man who wears it is, potentially, a hero."
Reprinted in Donz�, op cit.
[15] This business model only works when purchase decisions are driven mainly by brand. In a normal market, if one manufacturer restricts production, customers just buy from whichever competing manufacturer offers something as good. It's only when customers are seeking a certain brand rather than a certain level of performance that you can manipulate them by restricting its availability.
[16] Of course the first question one has on noticing a bubble is: will it burst? The reason ordinary bubbles eventually burst is that speculators get overoptimistic, but in this case the CEO of Patek Philippe controls the "money supply" and can thus take measures to cool down an overheated market. So there are probably only two things that could cause their specific bubble to burst: if his successor is not as capable, or if the whole custom of wearing mechanical watches goes away. The latter seems the greater danger. People aren't going to wear three things on their wrists, so all it would take is for there to be two popular devices that were worn on the wrist, and mechanical watches would start to be seen by the next cohort of young rich people as an old guy thing. It's hard to imagine a luxury watch brand surviving that.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Bill Clerico, Daniel Gackle, Luis Garcia, the people at Goldammer, Jessica Livingston, Ben Miller, Robert Morris, John Reardon, D'Arcy Rice, Alex Tabarrok, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.
Read the original article
Comments
By benleejamin 2026-03-0519:436 reply I don't think the Brand Age is as bleak as this essay suggests.
Branding is not inherently unproductive, nor is it guaranteed to produce worse watches. They may be larger and less accurate, but consumers still (evidently) find value in the brand. A Grand Seiko or a Nomos or a Patek is perhaps now even more interesting & identity-productive than a watch was in the 60s.
As technologists I think we're prone to dismissing improvements that aren't engineering-backed. But all life is storytelling, and labeling that work as "button-pushing" is… dismissive, to say the least.
By armchairhacker 2026-03-0520:182 reply What I got from the essay: "brand is the only way to beat competition when you can't significantly beat them on quality". It's basically the market suffering from success. You can buy a cheap quality watch today.
For some product types there is no better alternative, like ISPs. But I'd argue this is because of monopoly, which is different from brand. Most monopolies (like ISPs) usually have negative brands, and there's no alternative not because one can't create a better brand (that's easy), but because the upfront cost to become profitable is too high.
So the cutting edge things are happening in places where brand doesn’t matter. I could think of better examples but moldbot/clawdworld comes to mind. Or ASML, or national lab physics, or cheap attack drones, or.. idk can anyone think of better examples?
And “brand age” (as a broad moniker) is another way of saying innovation has stagnated.
By armchairhacker 2026-03-067:04 OpenClaw is an exception to your list. It’s easy to spin up an OpenClaw alternative (you can even fork it), but not clear how to significantly improve its function. You may argue that name recognition (what OpenClaw relies on today) is separate from brand; but if a competitor becomes popular (perhaps by offering slightly better security), unless OpenClaw can make a significant functional improvement (like better OpenAI integration, since OpenAI hired its creator), the only way I can imagine it regaining market is via brand.
innovation has stagnated because businesses have driven us to stagnation. Very few businesses provide any real value - the ones that do are running circles around everyone else - given the lack of ability, businesses turns to other, less useful methods of prying our money away from us and largely succeed because consumers are gullible and malleable.
By danielparsons 2026-03-066:242 reply ah the classic "most people are mere sheep, unlike us Great Minds"
By Bridged7756 2026-03-067:111 reply Where did you get that from that comment?. It seems clear to me that it was meant were all consumers.
By widowlark 2026-03-0620:06 yes, thank you - I did mean to include myself in the 'customers' category, apologies if it came off as holier-than-thou
By widowlark 2026-03-0620:17 apologies if my comment came off this way, it was not intended. I think all consumers (myself included!) are vulnerable to being swayed by commercial propaganda
By KaiserPro 2026-03-0522:11 Apart from the issue is omega (swatch group) has 3x the turnover of patek.
The other part of the story is swatch is also quite successful at the shit tier watches as well.
So this article misses the point really.
I took pg's point to mean that just because consumers see value in the purchase, that is not the same thing as the purchase being valuable - the race changed from 'provide the best function/value for the thing' to 'provide the most differentiated value to the consumer as an identity' and that is, for the most part, less useful.
By jonfromsf 2026-03-064:31 Defining your identity to other humans is incredibly useful. It's one of the essential tasks a human faces, and it makes all other tasks easier if done effectively.
By Imustaskforhelp 2026-03-0614:311 reply I suppose my question with it is will our identity be associated with brands who can/do spend billions and billions of dollars on advertisements or a brand of more authenticity.
Do we as humans feel more at ease with our identity/purchases buying a brand which is known by other people because it spends billions on it/ or a niche brand/smaller shop which is more authentic but people don't know about it.
To me, it feels like the david vs goliath story. My intuition says a mix of small but not too small / something which has history that you compromise on like support/quality of product etc. and sometimes price efficacy.
By widowlark 2026-03-0620:16 It's true that consumer choice is what defines the market. So really, yours is a cultural question. What do we as a society value? If it's brand identity, like today, then we will get branded products with as little purpose as possible. If we value authenticity, then brands will start building more authentic products. There's obviously a delay between what we value and what they offer, but its clear that building what customers want always yields a place in the market.
By throwaway2037 2026-03-0610:43 Yeah, I agree. This sentiment is weird to me. As a counterpoint, look at Ben and Jerry's ice cream from the 1990s. It was such a cool brand back in the day, and made delicious high-fat ice cream. (I know, I know: They sold out. But I am talking about before the sell-out.) Also, look at Chobani Yogurt in this generation. Amazing product and stellar brand.
By the way, how much more do we need a watch to do? Do we really need notifications, messages, phone calls, cameras, bluetooth, snapchat, remote control, heart rate monitoring and more in our wristwatches? I'm quite satisfied with just seeing the time on my arm. Anything else I can do with my phone or laptop. Even seeing the time is kinda redundant, as I could just check my phone.
> Anything else I can do with my phone or laptop
Most stuff, sure, but probably not -
> heart rate monitoring
So as someone who is cantering through middle age to a point in life close to where males in my family in older generations have experienced atrial fibrillation and other heart problems, having a heart rate monitor built into my watch that is capable of spotting early signs of this stuff is pretty cool. Having it (crudely) monitor blood oxygen lets me know that for all I snore, I don't seem to have terrible sleep apnea, and I'm considering an upgrade to one that does blood pressure too.
I know this is going to be of limited interest to the young, but these devices becoming more widespread is likely very helpful to an older cohort like myself (I'm 47), making them 'just part of the package' with smart watches puts this sort of health monitoring and information in reach for a lot of people who would otherwise probably not be interested in wearing an ugly medical device, and whose first sign of trouble might be a fibrillation episode or falling asleep at the wheel.
By zimpenfish 2026-03-0613:411 reply > I'm considering an upgrade to one that does blood pressure too.
I've got the Aktiia/Hilo band and I'd recommend it if you're wanting to keep vague[0] track of your 24/7[0] blood pressure. Needs calibrating every couple of weeks against the band but that's not an onerous procedure[1][2].
(Probably worth getting a cheapo monitor as a secondary check though - I've got a Renpho bluetooth one.)
[0] It only really takes measurements when you're not "moving" and that can be "running around", "jumping up and down", "typing furiously", etc. which does lead to gaps and only 3-4 measurements every 2 hour slot. Also their app is a bit rubbish and they don't have a decent export story - if you want more than their "daily average → Health", you need BPExtract to OCR the monthly PDF reports (which you have to request by hand, BTW!)
[1] Protip! DO NOT drop the band onto its on/off switch because it's fragile and will BORKEN itself. Mine got stuck in the on position but I've subverted the problem by sticking a magnetic MicroUSB end into the charging point[3] - applying power kicks it into charging mode and removing it leaves it in "ready to use" mode for 5-10 minutes which is more than enough for standard calibrations and testing.
[2] Although their new "BP via the camera and finger" doesn't work AT ALL for me. Almost never gets a reading.
[3] Which I've started doing for all MicroUSB devices because I've somehow managed to snap off 3 MicroUSB ports internally. Shoddy workmanship.
So I have an old fashioned "Salter" inflatable BP cuff unit that takes a few AA batteries, that I take readings on sporadically, and as I am borderline problematic (the diastolic number is usually a little high, systolic is not amazing but could be worse, no meds currently) I'm kinda/sorta looking at something that can keep track a bit more often and less intrusively.
But I was hoping that would be an updated Apple watch, as I have an 8 at the moment that does the other stuff :)
That said I understand that the BP measurements on smart watches are pretty execrable. Thanks for the info!
By zimpenfish 2026-03-0616:36 > But I was hoping that would be an updated Apple watch
Yeah, I think that might come in the future but it's probably a patent minefield[0]. That said I think Ringconn mentioned that they were looking at implementing it for their smart rings in the "near future" - who knows?
[0] There's also the "calibration against the smart cuff" step which I'm guessing any solution would need and that's probably a whole other FDA/patent minefield. Also tricky to have to sell a watch model with a required cuff and have to disable the BP functionality on watches that don't have a matched cuff. You can imagine the HN headlines...
By watwut 2026-03-068:00 I used to use smart watch. Then I got a cheap old school one ... and concluded I do not want smart watch again, ever. There is something liberating about putting a watch on your hand, not having to charge it every other day, seeing the time whenever I look at it (no matter what light conditions or which gesture I just made).
I do not want notifications buzzing on hand either. That is what the phone is for. I have a phone too, really, it is always next to me.
By zimpenfish 2026-03-0613:30 > Do we really need notifications, messages, phone calls, cameras, bluetooth, snapchat, remote control, heart rate monitoring and more in our wristwatches?
We? Maybe? Maybe not? Me? Yes, 100% Well, except Snapchat.
(Pro tip: Try not using your experience and desires as a guide/requirement for the larger populace - you'll feel a lot better about the world and yourself when you get the hang of it.)
> Anything else I can do with my phone or laptop.
The heart rate monitoring? Not nearly as accurate using a phone camera as a wrist-mounted multi-LED watch. Also I tend not to have my finger over my phone camera with a heartrate app running 24/7 - I find it gets in the way of actually using my phone for other stuff.
By Imustaskforhelp 2026-03-0614:24 > identity-productive
This word scares me because if identity is dependent on the type of product that you have or becomes larger part than it already is, especially within my generation at times. Then its quite scary to think.
A gaping hole of loneliness being filled with shallow identity being generated by and for consumerism.
As much as I think that what you meant was products alleviating the identity of the person, I think the chances of the identity itself being replaced by something more hollow is more likely as well.
Quite frankly,This word truly feels like something which comes out of American Psycho or reminds me so much of it.
Also, another point but I also feel the same feelings of hollowness from creating stuff with AI if we leave it autonomously as I mentioned with some aspect of consumerism although I am frugal. The similarities are quite a lot.
Money --> (Choice on what prompt/model you want your identity more associated with) --> (time) --> Product
Money --> (Choice on what product you want your identity more associated with) --> (time) --> product
And then repeat the cycle.
This has been a boom for capitalism but a loss for humanity, in my opinion.
By psychoslave 2026-03-068:16 > A Grand Seiko or a Nomos or a Patek is perhaps now even more interesting & identity-productive than a watch was in the 60s.
I have no idea what these brands sell and I give it so much importance I won't even bother make a search.
To my mind, this is a lose lose game. Society at large is being engaged into wasteful goals, and as all means are going to be useful in the game where all that matter is displaying more personal material whealths, general social outcomes are undermined: first bribery, then use of other mental coercion tools, then threats, then bare physical aggressions.
>As technologists I think we're prone to dismissing improvements that aren't engineering-backed.
No that's not about technology and engineering blindness. Technologies of course can serve best interests of general public and humanity at large. Or a improve efficiency of genocide. And social engineering can be used either to create isolation and hate between groups, or spread more solidarity, diversity being loved where it's open to reciprocal appreciation of differences, and many other virtuous bounds beyond local groups.
Not all life is story telling. Behind, there are real people with actual suffering and joys that goes beyond what even the most eloquent narrator can convey.
I liked reading this essay, but, I get the same vibe as a lot of PG essays. Which is, great writing and really intelligent thinking on an interesting subject, but without really being aware of ther stuff people have previously said/thought on the topic.
For instance:
> Brand is what's left when the substantive differences between products disappear.
I think, for better and worse, brands are a lot more than that.
Brands at least start out as a designation of quality, but in modern society, they're an important part in companies avoiding legal liability, and having more distributed supply chains.
Nike couldn't be the global brand it was today if it directly managed all its factories. Modern brands are a part of the economic landscape that is fundamental for making the kind of distributed supply chains that allow globalisation to be possible.
I think the essay mixes brands a little with conspicuous consumption, which can also happen without brands, like with artists or jewels. Its just that brands are so ever present, its not always obvious to see these examples.
So yeah, we definitely are in "the brand age", but brands definitely aren't non-functional at all. The world really would operate very differently without them.
By manbitesdog 2026-03-069:542 reply There is a fantastic book on this topic called "By Design : Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV" that cover the inception of modern brands. It's a very similar story to what happened to watches. The industrial revolution made quality clothing accesible for everyone, so the cloth appearance no longer was a clear indicative of status, so brands started placing their emblems on the outside of the fabric inside of the inside. At the time it was seen as gross, obvious and bad taste. Guess we had a century to normalize it.
By ninalanyon 2026-03-0722:36 > At the time it was seen as gross, obvious and bad taste.
It's still gross, obvious, and in bad taste.
By manbitesdog 2026-03-1115:27 I also got the recommendation from here, happy to see I'm giving it back!
By throwaway2037 2026-03-0610:402 reply
This is a weird statement to me. Replace "Nike" with "Intel". Intel manages all of its factories and is a global brand. (Yes, I know they recently outsourced some chip manuf to TSMC, but Intel was surely a global brand in the 1990s.) I don't get it. What am I missing?> Nike couldn't be the global brand it was today if it directly managed all its factories.Intel is definitely the exception. For most companies, like Nike or Apple to take two, they in-house design work, but then contract out manufacturing to external companies, who often themselves subcontract out work further.
I'm speculating now, but it seems really likely if that type of distributed supply chain didn't exist, we'd see a closer coupling of design and manufacturing (at an extreme end factories designing and producing their own product).
That outsourcing of manufacturing has let US companies like Nike and Apple stay dominant in the design field, despite almost all their manufacturing being carried out by Asian companies.
Ultimately the global economy is very complicated, but a lot of it is predicated on that design/manufacturing split, which is only enabled by distributed manufacturing contracted out by brands.
I'm not trying to argue any of this is good/bad, but just that the concept of a 'brand' plays a huge function in determining what the world economy looks like, and isn't an empty concept.
By Bewelge 2026-03-0612:58 I'm not sure I agree with your analysis.
It's true that branding gains importance as a differentiator when the product moves towards being a commodity or if its innovation has reached its peak . But I disagree that it's always the driving factor for how a company is structured.
There are some industries where the franchise model is most dominant (eg fast food chains) and some others where tight control over the value chain is the norm (eg apple). And funnily enough, one of the distinctive differentiators those luxury swiss watchmakers have, is: "We make every part ourselves. Everything is manufactured in Switzerland.". Then you have the OG multinational companies like P&G or Unilever, where branding definitely plays an important role but a lot of their brands are regional so it's yet another structure.
I really think it's mainly the specific industry and geopolitics that shape supply chains and not the branding.
> I'm speculating now, but it seems really likely if that type of distributed supply chain didn't exist, we'd see a closer coupling of design and manufacturing (at an extreme end factories designing and producing their own product).
It's an interesting question. I think it's safe to say that the main driver to outsource manufacturing was cost. But nowadays companies also benefit from things like reduced accountability. Even if we assume every part of the supply chain could be done within the US, wouldn't companies like Apple still eventually outsource the ugly parts of the supply chain to some third party within the US? Simply for the appearances.
By tiffanyh 2026-03-0613:43 Aren’t we talking about a company being “virtually integrated”.
By philipallstar 2026-03-0610:461 reply > Brands at least start out as a designation of quality, but in modern society, they're an important part in companies avoiding legal liability, and having more distributed supply chains.
This isn't brand; this is legal company structure. Brand is "what people think of when they hear the word Nike".
I suppose we're just disagreeing on definition here - but I'd at least try to make the case that if people having a single thing they think of when they hear the word Nike, is necessary for a company to be able to structure itself that way legally.
Otherwise, individual manufacturing companies, don't have the financial incentive to give companies like Nike as big a portion of the profits as they do. Currently that system works, because the brand association of "Nike" gives people some kind of status/quality-assurance/whatever that they are happy to pay for.
By philipallstar 2026-03-0910:11 Exactly I am just disagreeing with your definition of brand, which I think is what were doing with the original essay as well.
Of course a company can structure itself fully aligned with its brand: I start Philip's Tyre Repair and the brand is 1:1 with the company and the premises. I don't see why being able to do that is important to enforce.
The point is, particularly with somewhere like Nike, that they have all sorts of things they need to do (advertise shoes; design shoes; make shoes; move shoes; sell shoes to retailers) that not all of it needs to be branded as Nike particularly. Only really the advertise shoes is the "brand".
It's like how Red Bull outsource basically everything except advertising. Someone else makes the drinks; someone else moves them; someone else sells them. They just maintain a really good brand with advertising, including innovative stuff like X-games.
I think you have a different understanding of what exactly a brand is than do most people. Every profession has the right to develop its own jargon that subtly redefines common words in its own way so I'm not going to say that you're wrong about what "brand" means in any absolute way, just that you're wrong to say that pg is wrong.
By benrutter 2026-03-0614:05 Fair enough - although I'd add in my defense that my take wasn't "Paul Graham is wrong", in fact I really liked the essay and agreed with a lot of it. It was more that I think there's a lot more going on with brands than the essay makes out (although you might disagree with this take too)
By zahlman 2026-03-0620:18 > Which is, great writing and really intelligent thinking on an interesting subject, but without really being aware of ther stuff people have previously said/thought on the topic.
This seems likely accurate; but you know, I enjoy reading intelligent people work things out from first principles in their own voice.
By alexpotato 2026-03-0613:553 reply > I think, for better and worse, brands are a lot more than that.
There is a great quote about this:
"For things that are visible to other people when you use them, there are many brands. e.g clothes, cars, watches, skis, furniture etc
For things that are not visible, there are much fewer brands e.g. underwear.
By boisterousness 2026-03-071:26 > For things that are not visible, there are much fewer brands e.g. underwear.
Personal care products - shampoos, soaps, lotions
Nutritional supplements
are counterexamples
By Imustaskforhelp 2026-03-0614:111 reply This might be social stigma, we will be stigmatized by society if we dont have appropriate clothes for right situations as such, we buy so many clothes that are visible depending on the number of occasions and everything because we have to look appropriate for that and this is where number of brands can stem up from too and this brand has brand value, because oh, you got that X company shirt nice.
Nobody cares what brand your underwear is because its hidden.
Such products are usually fewer brands because what matters is a huge chain supply. You most likely buy it if its available retail or not, you don't go look at an ad and say, wow I want that brand but the idea is to make familiar with it.
But even if you aren't. There are just so few brands with supply chain directly to retails that such things usually end up getting centralized and convenience of buying is the largest factor. You want to drive less to get this stuff whereas you might go far away just to get a nice pair of shirt and jeans for example something which, again has to do with the visibility of the product/social stigma
Technically, the supply chain thing also directs itself to products like cole drinks for example. You are probably drinking coke/pepsi because its available everywhere and usually the choice that you see in different drinks is just some permutation of a drink/brand which is owned by the parent company (coke/pepsi). The amounts of brands owned by pepsi/coca cola are quite a lot to be honest.
By greedo 2026-03-0615:44 Ask a woman if she agrees that "Nobody cares what brand your underwear is because its(sic) hidden."
By m463 2026-03-0622:49 does it apply to restaurants?
I thought lots of restaurants behind-the-scenes either got food from external suppliers either in part or all the way to ghost kitchens.
By sadhplatte 2026-03-0622:33 PG’s idea here is that when substantive differences disappear between products, brand is what’s left, not that brand is defined by the absence of these differences.
"Because at Patek he'd encounter the most extreme brand age phenomenon: artificial scarcity. You can't just buy a Nautilus. You have to spend years proving your loyalty first by buying your way through multiple tiers of other models, and then spend years on a waiting list."
Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
I've heard other brands do this (Ferrari?) and, of course, there are lines outside "luxury" brands like Louis Vuitton. Why bother?
PS I'll stick to my Casios: https://blog.jgc.org/2025/06/the-discreet-charm-of-infrastru...
By garethsprice 2026-03-0521:339 reply Humans are status-seeking creatures, and status is expressed through signaling. If you're rich and so are the people around you, money alone ceases to be a differentiator. Ultra-luxury brands appeal to this by adding hoops that money alone can't clear: time, loyalty, relationships. The signal shifts from "I can afford this" to "I was invited to spend my money here."
Lines outside Louis Vuitton are more down-market, aspirational luxury - an ultra-wealthy person wouldn't be caught dead queuing on a sidewalk. Patek and Ferrari operate at the level above, where the signal isn't wealth but access. (HBS calls Ferrari's version "deprivation marketing.")
Is it a game worth bothering with? Enough people think so to sustain billion-dollar brands.
(Of course, PG writing an essay about being too smart for fancy watches - while knowing a lot about them - is its own signaling game, just aimed at a different audience)
Status is a tool for the working wealthy, but ultra-luxury brands are only appealing to a subset of wealthy people.
There’s a great number of people with 100+M and even far beyond that who enjoy nobody knowing just what kind of wealth they have. This doesn’t mean looking poor, but there’s plenty of value in anonymity.
By velocity3230 2026-03-0822:46 I don't know why anyone would want to be rich and famous.
Rich and anonymous is where it's at.
By titanomachy 2026-03-0522:442 reply He’s probably also too rich for fancy watches to actually be a useful signal of wealth amongst his peers.
I had a coworker who became nouveau riche a while back- he made fuck you money day trading during the roaringkitty debacle - and one interesting thing he said about the experience was that he learned certain luxury goods, such as high end watches, don't depreciate. Like gold jewelry one can usually resell them for cost plus inflation. As such, his logic was that a fancy watch is essentially free while a cheap watch costs whatever it costs.
Not sure if that's the truth or clever marketing by purveyors of luxury goods, but it changes the wealth signaling dynamics of fancy watches if it is.
By garethsprice 2026-03-0616:02 Patek and Rolex have generally always held value well. The internet has brought price transparency and created a secondary market that has made this true for most well-known brands these days, with the caveat that there is not a high degree of liquidity (yes you can sell a Rolex same-day at a pawn shop but you'll take a big hit, otherwise you are waiting a while for a buyer and navigating various risks like scammers).
So you likely won't get rich day-trading (or even collecting) watches, but besides the initial capital investment it is not as irrational as it seems at first.
Of course, that only adds to the signaling power for the classes where merely having money isn't enough, and being a "savvy investor" is a status marker (ie. the upper-middle and nouveau riche).
The Patek Nautilus PG mentions is particularly interesting as a status symbol as it has not only held value but, for various reasons, been an outlier that has appreciated drastically in value. It'd be gauche even on Sand Hill Rd to wear a hat that says "My investments beat the S&P 500" — but for the last few years, flashing a Nautilus (~413% investment return from 2016-2026 vs ~322% in the S&P) is the equivalent of that, a self-reinforcing cycle boosting its value as a Veblen good where the high price is the point.
By OJFord 2026-03-069:25 I don't think that's really any more true of watches and gold jewellery than it is cars - which is to say it's true of some models, or over time and especially what comes to be considered a classic.
Maybe he meant second-hand though? If someone else has already taken the 'used' depreciation on a watch, the 'art' added value on the gold price, then yes I think it's probably fair to say they hold their residual value better than a lot of things that continue to depreciate.
By cam_l 2026-03-0611:11 I dunno about that. I bought a Casio at a garage sale in the late eighties for 20 cents, and sold it to a mate 10 years later, give or take, for a couple of bucks. It was still running, still keeping time.
Expensive watches are way closer to bitcoins than useful assets. They inherently rely on the gullibility of other rich prick wanna be's. Still a good bet probably.. sadly..
By intuitionist 2026-03-0523:141 reply The price isn’t keeping anyone at that level of wealth from buying a Nautilus or a Lange 1 or a panda Daytona. But they can still flex with ultralimited pieces like Zuck’s Greubel Forsey.
I didn't realize that "fools and their money will soon be parted" was a flex.
By intuitionist 2026-03-0523:361 reply “There are three of these things made in a year, and I’ve got the juice to get one of them” is. Zuck doesn’t care about a million dollar price tag, any more than I would care about a couple bucks.
By soperj 2026-03-0617:26 If he was buying a solid gold furby would you have the same take? That's great that he doesn't care, still looks like an idiot to me.
By rswail 2026-03-0613:11 > (Of course, PG writing an essay about being too smart for fancy watches - while knowing a lot about them - is its own signaling game, just aimed at a different audience)
He was aiming at people like the people commenting on this thread and who read the essay.
Also to the startup/entrepreneur founder-types that are actually interested in building a business that makes a qualitative improvement in the market that it works in.
But mechanical watches are very appealing to nerd/geek types as well, purely in terms of the design and engineering of the movements and the precision of the manufacture.
Complications are absolutely pointless, but making a movement that can deliver them is very appealing.
By userulluipeste 2026-03-061:471 reply "The signal shifts from «I can afford this» to «I was invited to spend my money here.»" "the signal isn't wealth but access"
The most shocking aspect here is the mindset of these people that come to value this access, and the fact that they have to have their own self-perceived worth at some lower (i.e. improvable) level in comparison. It has to be, otherwise the value of that access can't make much sense, otherwise that association to a brand (as chosen not chooser) can't be perceived as something of value. The only (sane) question worth asking, knowing that about the people falling into this game is - do I want to count myself as one of them?
By danielparsons 2026-03-066:26 I think it just sounds like a fun game to be honest. By a goofy little overengineered piece of jewellery. Buy a bunch of them and join the club. Compare to your friends. Reminds me of pokemon cards on the school playground...
By observationist 2026-03-0522:25 >>> ...PG writing an essay about being too smart for fancy watches
Stealthy, like a submarine.
By keybored 2026-03-0522:22 I know I’m being sold something when someone declares the science of human nature.
By nitwit005 2026-03-0523:28 While the ultra rich do buy from luxury brands, they're often spending the most on unique items, such as ordering a custom yacht.
Having the most expensive item in some category, or close to it, often gets you news coverage, which is something a normal purchase can't really offer.
By bigstrat2003 2026-03-063:062 reply > Of course, PG writing an essay about being too smart for fancy watches - while knowing a lot about them - is its own signaling game, just aimed at a different audience
So you're saying that everyone seeks status, and even the people who say they don't are seeking status by not seeking status? That argument seems like you are overreaching. What, then, would you consider evidence that falsifies your theory?
By garethsprice 2026-03-0614:32 Yes - though this isn't my theory so much as settled science. There are no substantial counter-theories to the concept that status desire is a fundamental and universal human motive.
As for falsification: you'd need evidence like subjects showing no well-being drop (self-esteem, cortisol) from lab-induced status demotions, or entire cultures genuinely indifferent to respect. Neither holds up in the data: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25774679/
John Adams put it well in Discourses on Davila (1790): "The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger — and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe a pain as the gout or stone."
By danielparsons 2026-03-066:31 status-seeking isn't inherently bad or good, depends who's appreciation you are seeking
By otterley 2026-03-062:28 > If you're rich and so are the people around you, money alone ceases to be a differentiator.
You could differentiate based on your personality. It costs nothing at all, and is far more interesting than a trinket.
Strive to be Warren Buffet, not Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
Actually in many cases it is for social KPI storytelling. I know some wealthy people and at gatherings they love to tell 5-10min long stories of exclusive processes that they followed to gain something exclusive while dropping names and numbers. The processes are easy to understand for the entire social circle (i.e. not technical or business achievements which they can't easily disclose).
By rfw300 2026-03-0521:28 Being wealthy solves virtually all problems of consumption, so the invisible hand provides new problems to serve the market need. Beautiful, really.
By sdwr 2026-03-0521:08 It's a formalized, sanitized simulacrum of striving! Like sports is for competition
By jvanderbot 2026-03-0520:112 reply So, hobbies. You're talking about hobbies.
No, he talks about status signalling.
They might pass the time doing those things, but not as a mere passtime or hobby, like if they were sewing or playing CoD. Unlike those, doing them and telling about doing them serves a specific social purpose.
By jvanderbot 2026-03-0521:311 reply I'm not arguing with you - you have a valid point.
But I don't view hobbies as that separate from status signals within the hobbying group. Oh you play games? What games? Did you beat it? etc etc.
Esoteric knowledge/practices here are status signls (Oh you reached shattered planet without xyz??).
That starts to sound a lot like "Oh you aquired a lambo XYZ without usual steps abc" and that's a really fun convo in the in-group, and a total miss with the out-group.
By coldtea 2026-03-0522:37 >But I don't view hobbies as that separate from status signals within the hobbying group.
The difference though is that this is not meant to serve "within the hobbying group".
They serves the status signal purpose when showing them to "laymen" and other rich people in general, not necessarily to other expensive car buyers or luxury watch buyers.
In other words, the, typically quiet, flaunting, is done to people otherwise uninterested about the specific ting, that nonetheless recognize the exclusivity and the knowledge that it's a subtle signal of "elevated taste" and that they belong to the tasteful-rich club.
I have several hobbies, and none of them revolve around artifical scarcity or gatekeeping.
(Well, the way that _some_ people play Magic: The Gathering does - but I wouldn't want to play with anyone who raised a stink about proxies)
By jvanderbot 2026-03-0522:041 reply Look, I dont want to be argumentative, but my (perhaps cynical) view on people who say they don't do status signaling when they "avoid status signaling" is it's just like the fish who goes "what's water"? It's worth thinking about whether you're doing it by accident.
By scubbo 2026-03-101:07 You're shifting the goalposts. I agree that status signalling happens in hobbies. I disagree that everyone who indulges in a hobby does so purely - or even mostly, or at all! - in order to be able to tell stories about ways they managed to "cut the line".
Some of just like to do things, and to attain status by doing things well, rather than by bragging about our ability to cheat.
EDIT: to put it a different way - all tales of "skipping the line" are an integral part of that hobby; but not all hobbies involve, and not all hobbyists enjoy, tales of "skipping the line". And; every tale of "skipping the line" is status signalling, but not every status signal is such a tale.
By georgemcbay 2026-03-0520:331 reply "Let's see Paul Allen's card"
I wonder if it's intentional that they all say "Aquisitions", with no "c".
As for fonts etc: https://hobancards.com/blogs/thoughts-and-curiosities/americ...
By georgemcbay 2026-03-0522:12 They all have the same phone number too.
This could be explained away by them working for the same place and assuming to contact them you call the same switchboard and ask for the person, but even back in the 90s it would have been strange for wall street "Vice Presidents" (even if it was somewhat of a ceremonial title) to not have their own unique business number.
Also, Paul Allen giving his card to someone else with the same contact number for the purposes of being in touch to plan to play squash doesn't make much sense unless you get meta and assume Paul Allen was aware this had no practical value and just wanted to ego-drop the card.
Economists have a term for these kinds of things where the demand rises as prices rise: Veblen goods
By marcosdumay 2026-03-0521:103 reply Buying unnecessary expensive stuff is one thing. But it's hard to understand why anybody would want to display that total loyalty to a brand signal.
By fragmede 2026-03-0522:23 It taps into a very primordial "I'm better than you" urge some people need.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2026-03-0523:02 Harley Davidson, anyone?
By animal_spirits 2026-03-0522:26 "There is only sex. Everything is sex" - Robert California
By observationist 2026-03-0522:241 reply It's exclusivity and sales schticks. Artificial scarcity, social status, conspicuous consumption. Same things that drive influencers to rent limos, pose on other people's private jets, pretend to buy bottles in clubs, flash fake cash, wear bling.
From a birds-eye view it's less a hedonistic treadmill and more a feeding frenzy.
It's a game you can play, but for the life of me, I cannot comprehend why you'd want to, there are so many other better things in life.
>>> Why bother?
Exactly - go give someone you love a hug, that's worth infinitely more than flexing an expensive watch.
By robocat 2026-03-0618:45 > Exactly - go give someone you love a hug, that's worth infinitely more than flexing an expensive watch.
Hugs are massive signals of status (who, where, initiator, awkwardness, yada yada).
My fascination with the politics of hugs might be called autistic by some.
I wonder whether my own status avoidance is on account of being bad at playing at ladders.
Because the people bothering are precisely those that want to differentiate themselves from those who'd rather stick to their Casios :)
Genuinely. All fashion, all accessories, whatever you put on your body is a signal, even if you don’t intend it to be. Your outfit is a costume, and so is everyone else’s.
By circlefavshape 2026-03-0610:16 and all the world is a stage
By CGMthrowaway 2026-03-060:04 >I've heard other brands do this (Ferrari?)
It's called relationship-based allocation or more simply purchase history requirement, and its practiced by both Patek and Rolex but add to the list famously Hermes, Bugatti, high jewelry from VCA/Bulgari etc, getting access to prestigious artists at galleries, etc.
The devil's advocate/ other side of the coin is that it's not just a moneygrab, it protects the brand image by controlling who is seen wearing / using your products. When the value of these goods is so influenced by who else has them, that kind of control is intrinsically important for the seller.
By kridsdale1 2026-03-0519:342 reply Anyone with $(80,00-250,000) (which is a lot of you) can buy a Nautilus today[1].
This status-through-martyrdom ritual to get it from retail at MSRP is utterly bizarre.
[1] https://www.chrono24.com/patekphilippe/nautilus--mod106.htm
By candiddevmike 2026-03-0520:464 reply More and more I realize I am completely obvlious to all of the class signaling happening here. I couldn't imagine spending that much on anything, let alone a watch. And I certainly wouldn't think someone wearing that did, either.
I feel bad for the folks who pick up on stuff like this, that must be a heavy weight to bear constantly comparing yourself to other people.
By AnotherGoodName 2026-03-0521:112 reply Ironically a desire for such social signalling requires being poor enough that you believe the item is worth a vast and near unobtainable amount of money making it seem like a very impressive signal to you. That’s what makes these items desirable. As in these signals can be a sign of just how poor you are as opposed to how wealthy.
A classic case is when you observe teenager targeted status signalling trends. This can be as low value as an expensive shirt, ie shirts branded ‘supreme’ costing $300 which isn’t worth signalling to anyone who pays rent or a mortgage. But to a teenager? Wow man $300! such status!!! On the flip side if we see someone above teenager age wearing such teenager targeted status symbols we reasonably subconsciously assume they live with their parents and have very little income.
This continues up the wealth chain forever. Status symbols are invariably a way to see just how little people actually have because the person wearing the status symbol clearly believes the value of what they are flaunting is impressive.
Status symbols aren’t a signal of how much money you have so much as signal of what you believe to be an incredible amount of wealth to flaunt.
By apsurd 2026-03-0523:13 Well framed. I will add though that it's not entirely indicative of how much one thinks is a lot; it can also be, as was explained to me, that for ultra wealthy people, the price, at any magnitude becomes a rounding error.
half a million for a car sounds absurd to me, but it's 0.5% of $100M. Compare that to $50k car on a ~$200k median net-worth US household.
Yep. I'm in a European city, most of the people driving Mercedes and BMW cars are, if not outright poor, low-status, low-education, low long-term wealth.
The old money drives beat-up cars (often Swedish made, US imports for enthusiasts, or old-style 4x4s for outdoor pursuits) and are more likely to take taxis. Young, highly-educated BoBo types walk, take transit or cycle.
Just-above-poor neighbourhoods have a much higher proportion of flash cars than rich ones.
By watwut 2026-03-068:12 I mean, you just wrote that rich people buy vanity cars and poor people buy cars that are for daily use. US imports for enthusiasts and old-style 4x4s for outdoor pursuits are both definition of vanity car.
By munificent 2026-03-0523:23 > I am completely oblivious to all of the class signaling happening here.
If you're comfortably middle class and in a demographic recognized to "deserve" to be middle class, then you can afford to be oblivious to a whole lot of class signaling. You aren't striving to reach a higher station, and you aren't likely to get demoted out of your current one, so you can mostly ignore it.
People that are lower-class and trying to move up, or in demographic categories that are often shunned access to higher social classes don't have that luxury and are incentivized to be savvy to this kind of stuff.
This is one of the kinds of things that people talk about when they talk about "privilege". It's not that you should feel bad because you don't have to worry about this stuff. It's just an acknowledgement that some people have the privilege of not having to worry about this stuff because they were born into a level of class security that others lack.
By coldtea 2026-03-0521:12 >I feel bad for the folks who pick up on stuff like this, that must be a heavy weight to bear constantly comparing yourself to other people.
You can have that heavy weight while living on the suburbs or even the ghetto too. The objects are prices mostly change with the wealth level, not the game.
By fragmede 2026-03-0522:27 I dunno, I'd probably spend that much on a house.
By thot_experiment 2026-03-0520:014 reply Holy shit that's an ugly watch too, looks like something outta chinatown lmao.
By garethsprice 2026-03-0521:45 It being an "acquired taste" is part of the appeal. A lot of high-end stuff is ass-ugly on purpose. If everyone liked it because it simply looked nice, you couldn't tell who's "in the club" of other rich people. Brands will attach elaborate stories and histories to objects to make people feel cultured that they have invested time in acquiring the knowledge, but really it comes down to in-group object recognition.
By LevGoldstein 2026-03-0520:52 My least favorite of that eras Gerald Genta designs. The original Royal Oak is comparatively far more attractive. Both are outdone by the 222 (different designer though), but it's all subjective.
By PaulHoule 2026-03-0520:29 Ads for Patek Philippe on the back of The Economist get more and more annoying over time. (e.g. the president writes "How Happy I am to be a Nepo Baby")
By ninalanyon 2026-03-0722:45 These things are shibboleths. It doesn't really matter what they look like or whether they are actually any good for their ostensible purpose so long as they signal that you are a member of the correct group.
Clothes, wristwatches, cars, you name it. It's a very common play on luxury brands, Hermes Birkins is the most famous that comes to my mind and follow a very similar playbook.
Apart from the KYC aspect of the process it's their way of solving the problem of artificial scarcity on the second-hand market as the article explains. They want a second hand market to exist to indicate that this is a luxury item, but too many and the price tanking with excess supply.
By kevin_thibedeau 2026-03-0521:07 It also solves the real problem of labor scarcity. If you have X master watchmakers available to make a halo product you can only get so much output from them. You can increase X, increase production efficiencies (reduce labor input), or limit supply. The first two reduce exclusivity and perceived quality so the third makes sense if you can live without growth or can grow via high pricing strategies.
By Zak 2026-03-061:16 Jay Leno, perhaps the world's most famous car collector refuses to buy a Ferrari due to practices like that.
By giancarlostoro 2026-03-0521:46 I just want low maintenance cars. Everything else is a waste.
By ChrisMarshallNY 2026-03-0522:19 > Casios
I've got three Oceanus watches (Casio's boutique brand). I never wear them, anymore, because of Apple Watch.
I brought a couple of them in Japan. There, the G-Shock brand is very popular. They sell G-Shock watches for ridiculously (to Americans, who are used to cheap G-Shocks) high prices.
By stronglikedan 2026-03-0519:182 reply > Why bother?
ego, of course
By measurablefunc 2026-03-0519:29 Vanity. Ego is something else.
By JumpCrisscross 2026-03-0519:292 reply > ego, of course
This is so silly. Do you really not have any hobbies where you spend inordinate time or money on things you could objectively accomplish quicker and cheaper, but having less fun, in other ways? Like, I ski. It’s a silly way to get up and down a hill in the 21st century.
I’m not a watch guy. But mechanical watches are beautiful. There are idiots who buy them. But that doesn’t mean everyone who does is an idiot.
Collecting watches isn't a hobby, it's pure consumerism. Sure many hobbies have (recently?) gotten way more people spending top dollars for no reason but with watch collecting there's nothing else. You're not tweaking the dials, you don't know how to make the watch, you just watch it and wear it while a technologically superior version is 500 times cheaper. There's also no natural shortage of them, they can make a trillion of these watches.
At least with cars or audio equipment there's some marginal benefits once you get to crazy numbers, not the case with watches.
By s1artibartfast 2026-03-0523:02 What is wrong with watch consumerism? It isn't like it's ruining the planet and hurting anyone. Like you said, there is no shortage and nobody will die without them.
By JumpCrisscross 2026-03-063:18 > You're not tweaking the dials, you don't know how to make the watch, you just watch it and wear it while a technologically superior version is 500 times cheaper
This describes precisely zero watch enthusiasts I know. Each of them can open up the watch and understand what's happening. In one case, he'll disassemble the major components to clean them. (Analogous to how riders can take care of their horses and gear, or I can tune and wax my skis.)
Your dismissal could be just as accurately be applied to the various programming languages many of us learn for fun. We don't know how to write its compiler. We can barely do anything useful in it. We just play with it while a technologically-superior version would take a fraction of the effort.
> There's also no natural shortage of them, they can make a trillion of these watches
Quartz? Obviously. Aegler/Rolex? Probably. Handmade movements? No.
> At least with cars or audio equipment there's some marginal benefits once you get to crazy numbers, not the case with watches
As an enthusiast of neither cars nor watches, I call total bullshit on this comparison. Anyone arguing they're getting utility out of their Ferrarri, Pagani, Omega or Audemars is full of themselves.
By kridsdale1 2026-03-0519:382 reply We can say all the same things about cars, but nobody thinks it’s odd that there’s a status culture about cars worth more than $75,000.
By bombcar 2026-03-0519:53 Because that’s only 2-5x the price of a new cheap car.
A watch at $80,000 is what, 10,000x what a new cheap one is?
But good for them! It’s really hard to be angry at them for buying said watch without it being some form of jealousy.
By JumpCrisscross 2026-03-0519:46 > nobody thinks it’s odd that there’s a status culture about cars worth more than $75,000
Sure. To each their own. I drive a Subaru. I don’t think it’s weird that others like a nice car. (I also think there are douchebags who drive both.)
By aaron695 2026-03-0523:43 [dead]
By fud101 2026-03-062:06 >Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
pg dr. This is the answer. A pg article is clickbait at best, harmful at worst. Keep in mind this is the same man who chose to write his antiwokeness hit peace right at the cusp of the election.
By zinkem 2026-03-0522:07 > Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
What a tired aphorism. Just like PG's 50 year old insights.
