Bargains For Me

If you're hunting for a new apartment in a place like New York City, you quickly come to feel in your bones that the market is pretty efficient. You want a low price for a large space and to be right near the subway, and so does everybody else, so that kind of apartment is not available on the open market: if a place is large and cheap then it's far from transit, and if it's cheap and near transit then it's small, and if it's cheap and large and near transit then there is something horrifically wrong with it (like the building I looked at which had deafening all-day construction noise outside, and a strangely optimistic realtor who told me I could solve this by buying a white noise machine). As a dear friend of the blog likes to say, bargains are bargains for a reason.

As a result, at some point in the apartment-hunt, the smart thing to do is start asking not "what would I ideally like in an apartment?," but "what do I care about less than other people do."

If you realise that you're out at work all day and won't get to see the view anyway, you can get a place with a bad view that is therefore better on size/cost/location than it would be otherwise.

Or if you don't care about "luxury building" amenities, like having a doorman or an in-building gym, you can get a better price by looking at buildings without those things. (I actively prefer not-having a doorman, for inverse Confucian reasons).

Eventually, you'll visit an apartment and think: ok, I understand why this place is priced lower than the size and location imply, and the thing that makes it worth less on the market is not as big of an issue for me as for the average renter, so this place is a bargain for me.

(There is still a decent chance you're about to get a terrible deal for reasons you didn't understand, and then spend the next year of your life regretting it, but at least there's some chance you're getting a bargain on your own terms).

Here's the point where I say something that takes economic principles and applies them to social life, to which some % of people will say "oh yes of course that makes sense," and another % of people will say "this is monstrous and you should be banned from society."

Namely: the same applies to people.

There is not an efficient market in friends or lovers, but there is some kind of market and some amount of efficiency. "Everyone" wants a tall and rich and handsome husband, so mostly it's the same deal as the apartments: if you meet a man who's tall and rich he won't be handsome, if he's rich and handsome he won't be tall, and if he's all three then there's something else horrifically wrong with him (e.g. he's a blogger).

The same goes with friendships. There are some traits that rub a lot of people up the wrong way, but are not (I'd argue) necessary friendship deal-breakers – for example, arrogance. Some arrogant people are still smart and interesting, they're just annoying and pompous about it. If you're unusually unbothered by arrogance, you can get a great friend "at a discount" – they have more time for you because other people don't want to hang out with them, so you get a great and interesting friend at a bargain for you.