Chris Bostic is Deputy Director for Policy of ASH, Action on Smoking and Health. Which, since 1967 has been campaigning against Big Tobacco to reduce the death toll from smoking.

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So this is a famous clip of Ellen Degeneres

on her TV show talking about some ridiculous products aimed at women.

Ellen is a pretty funny character, but she

really doesn’t need to do much work to get a laugh at the idea of pens

specially for women.

But this clip refers to one trope that was

going around a while back, called the Pink Tax.

The idea was that products aimed at women

were having their prices jacked up by the evil patriarchy so that women had to

pay more for the same things than men. The whole idea was really just a

clickbait thing, and it was confused as to whether it referred to products that

were marketed at women’s preferences, or products that women needed to be different

to men’s products because of their physiology.

Ellen’s example is a pretty clear case of a

product that you can literally pay any price you like for. You can go to a

discount store and buy packs of dozens of pens for a dollar or so, or you can

spend hundreds of dollars for a single premium pen. I found one

pen for sale online that costs more than $5,000 – but hey, it’s got free

shipping. And all those pens do pretty much the same job; what you write won’t

be any better because you wrote it with a pen that costs thousands of times

more than the cheapest pen out there.

But why does this extreme price difference

exist? Surely the laws of the market should flatten out the prices. Well,

clearly they don’t. Because here’s a secret of capitalism. If you’re selling

pork bellies or  currency futures, supply

and demand set the prices, it’s a true marketplace. But if you’re buying a pen

because you want to sign a card that you’re sending to someone – do you really

shop around? Of course not.

What sets the price is what the market will

bear.