Was talking to my partner about pokeman and how we used to trade things in grade school with other kids (how I acquired my whole collection) and it got me thinking about how kids assign value to things??
Does anyone else remember walking around on the playground and exchanging things like pen toppers for cool erasers or tamagotchis for pokeman or yu-gi-oh cards?? Literally anything and everything from those smelly food-shaped erasers to entire toys like bionicles.
It’s just really interesting to me to see how kids perceive value. We would have a whole thing going on the playground like “this mewtwo card is worth at least two beyblades” and even though tamagotchis were all the rage when I was a kid (and certainly not as cheap as a pack of pokemon cards) we traded them like candy just because everyone loved them. By the end of grade 5, I think I had two or three and I had maybe exchanged one of them for a troll doll pencil topper.
Basically, kids don’t give a crap about market prices. They will assign value to things (even if they’re not that entertaining) based on how much they like them (popularity with brands definitely has something to do with this but they were popular because kids went crazy for them).
This doesn’t even really align with Marx’s argument about how commodities have “use-value” because kids don’t even use these things for any real purpose. Basically, fifth graders turn both Marxist and capitalist theory on their heads because they just want to share cool stuff with their friends
