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The Guardian view on Lego: price is not value

Children at the V&A Museum of Childhood Lego sculpture exhibition
Children at the V&A Museum of Childhood Lego sculpture exhibition, 19 March 2018. ‘The price of Lego sets goes up the less they’re played with.’ Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock

Did you tread on a fortune this morning? Are you still limping as a result? The parents of most children will know the sudden pain of a plastic brick sinking its little fangs into bare, vulnerable feet. But instead of just screaming or throwing the thing away, perhaps they should confine it to a box and sell it later. There is a thriving secondhand market in Lego and two Russian economists have found that some sets have appreciated by 8% a year in real terms between 1987 and 2015. This looks like a great victory for humanity. But there are some problems with it that go beyond the well known ability of Lego bricks to escape from any confinement. Unlike other stores of value: paper money, gold, massless electrons, cigarettes or even cowrie shells, Lego bricks are actually useful while you own them. Scrooge McDuck can roll around in banknotes, but if he’d put his money into Lego he could be playing with it in a much more satisfying way.

On closer inspection, the picture is less pleasing. The price of Lego sets goes up the less they’re played with. It’s not the bricks themselves, with their invitation to open-ended play, that make the money, but the specialised sets all designed to be built into one predesigned model that leaves little to the players’ imagination. In fact, even though Lego bricks of any pattern are all identical, the auction sites offer a premium for those sets which contain the original bricks. The collectors are not paying for the plastic but for the penumbra round it that exists only in their imagination. In the end, we’re left with a question that goes to the heart of capitalism: if the price of Lego sets increases by 8% a year, does their value do the same?