What the certificate is for

Luxury has always been a strange purchase. The point of a very expensive watch is not that it tells the time better. A modest one keeps time just as well. The extra money buys something else: the knowledge, yours and your friends', that you could afford to pay far more than the thing was worth.

That kind of luxury is getting harder to sustain. Good copies are everywhere, and decent quality is cheap. A watch that once announced something now has to be inspected to be believed.

So the impulse has found a new home. In Riyadh, as in most places, the talk around the dinner table has turned to things bought online whose usefulness is close to nothing. A digital certificate saying you own an image anyone can look at for free. A coin with a cartoon behind it.

What these offer is very like what the watch offered. Scarcity. A story. Something to talk about with people whose opinion you care about. The price is high precisely because it makes no practical sense, and that is the appeal.

There is nothing wrong with paying for that, if the money is spare and you know what you are paying for. People have always spent money on standing.

The difficulty is the word used for it. People call it investing. An investment is something you hold because it produces value. This is something you hold because someone else may want it more tomorrow. That chain ends. When it does, each of these things will belong to one last owner, who finds nobody willing to pay what he paid.

Speculation can be a fine pastime. It is a costly thing to mistake for a plan.