It lacks a (giant) leather pouch! :-]

Well, I wasn't even talking from a labor standpoint, but that's of course a factor. I mean identifying locations, planning the dig, buying the land, and then the actual labor involved to unearth them and, following, cut them to form. Other rocks may be much easier to acquire and find, hence the lower perceived value.

All that can be considered as labour, i.e. effort. That effort will be reflected in prices to the extent that those selling diamonds want to cover what they put in (including wages to pay for other people's effort) and make a profit on top; but does the effort explain the price, or does the price make the effort worth your while in the first place? Say it takes E units of effort to mine diamonds with a market value of V: if some other, plain-looking kind of rock takes E effort to mine a similar volume, would you expect it also to sell at V? Or will the rock-buying public just tell you to invest your efforts into mining the kinds of rock people can be persuaded to want?

Though given the typical use of a diamond, its final recipient might care about someone's efforts, i.e. her swain's.

(Of course, on the evidence of this thread there may be some people who'll pay handsomely for plain rocks, but that just shows there's one born every minute.)

That's stretching the term a bit. There's not a 1:1 ratio of personnel to effort.

Also, clearly there's an aesthetic value (and others) ascribed to things, so it's not reasonable to suggest that any ol' rock taking X amount of effort to procure should have the same value.

Mind you, I'm not defending DeBeer's monopoly, but simply stating why the thing has perceived value. Cash also has perceived value, but the effort to procure it isn't the same as diamonds or other precious stones. Which really gets to the point that these are just bartering conduits.

I didn't invent the term 'labour theory of value', so I'm not interested in defending its usages.

I have the impression you may be after psychological explanations for why people desire some kinds of rock over others, rather than economic explanations of market prices. In that regard, aesthetic appeal certainly looks more plausible than people's knowing or greatly caring how many man-hours went into obtaining a gem.

Yes, exactly.

But in this specific instance I'm just going out on a limb and saying that Nordstrom probably wouldn't be willing to go after difficult to procure rocks to use for this because it's not intended to compete in the gem market anyways. It's a $85 rock, not a Tiffany ring. It doesn't need the level of aesthetic appeals to garner it's price (plus the perceived value aforementioned).

Because of that, I'm saying it's likely, considering the labor theory of value, that they didn't go after something tricky, where more easily procured (low hanging fruit) were easier and therefore cheaper.

I'm thereby implying that diamonds have a greater value (above and beyond DeBeers artificially inflating prices perhaps) due to the extra work that went into acquiring them. IE - It's not all bs.

Their sign could use a little work.

I have a hard time taking people seriously that consider value of exchange to be a thing in its own right rather than a byproduct of the value measured by utility.

We've become very attached to it because it allows us to rationalize having people spending large amounts of time and energy on activities that are of no value to the economy. Or, as in this case, is a net negative on the economy. Somebody wasted time, energy, oil and various other resources in order to present us with the opportunity to buy something that is of no value whatsoever.

But, really the right thing to do is to just cut hours and increase pay somewhat. The pay wouldn't even need to go as high as it is now on an annual basis as a large amount of the money that people spend is largely a waste. It's things like fees from greedy companies, gas traveling to and from the office and health-care when you exhaust yourself by working too much and being exposed to too many sick people.
People want diamonds only because they've been conditioned to want them. While there are industrial uses for diamonds, the reason most people want them is simply because DeBeers runs a ton of ads and they've become a status symbol.

Similarly, gold and silver also have industrial uses, but our use of them for jewelery is mainly as a show of status. A person with that type of jewelery is telling people that they have so much money that they can afford to waste it on pointless bullshit.

It's roughly equivalent to places where people will grow their fingernails really long so that nobody thinks they are laborers. You see it sometimes where men will literally only have the pinkie nails ultralong with the others more or less normal.

And ultimately, this kind of thinking has reached the point of disease. In the past, it wasn't usually much of a problem as people had to earn what they had and by and large did. But, these days, ti's a redirection of wealth to places where it's not needed from places where it is needed.

I said earlier that the effort (or cost in wages of someone else's effort) required to mine diamonds sets an effective floor to the price (of newly mined diamonds), since nobody wants to sell at a loss (or a meagre profit). However, if the price people were willing to pay dipped below that floor, the result would just be no diamond mining.

I do agree that ostensible rarity is a factor (among others)--and clearly the stockpilers at De Beers agree too. As for whether it's (psychologically) significant whether the rarity arises because diamonds are scarce or because they're hard to obtain (or because of a cartel), we may just have to agree to disagree.