Does Our Economy Cultivate Beauty?

Why do peacocks have such astounding feathers? You know the main reason: it’s about attracting the 
ladies.[1] Humans share something in common with peacocks: we compete to please others with beauty.[2] In the marketplace, we offer beautiful things to others and seek to adorn ourselves. And our economy has a lot to say about what we find beautiful and what beauty we find in the world. Can a society driven by profit motives truly cultivate beauty?

One critique of our industrialized, market-based economy is that it destroys beauty.[3] Fast-furniture made of particle board replaced hand-crafted wooden furniture. Fast-food and processed foods replaced “real food,” and fast-food restaurants that used to reside in colorful buildings with creative, customized architecture have moved to square buildings with lots of grey and brown. Endless varieties of apples were replaced by a handful of mass-farmed varieties engineered for uniform appearance and durability. Joni Mitchell said we “pave paradise and put up a parking lot.”[4] 

There are three fundamental ways we allocate resources together: centralized redistribution, decentralized voluntary exchange in markets, and interpersonal reciprocity or gifts.[5] Our society uses all three, but a large percentage of the goods we enjoy are bought and sold in markets. So how do markets produce or fail to produce beauty in our lives, and what is the best way forward? Perhaps market forces have led to the brutal efficiency of mass production and lured us into appealing to the desires of others in shallow ways. Perhaps markets enable decentralized coordination and open possibilities of beautiful creativity and abundance that would otherwise be impossible.

The Market for Beautiful Places

You can’t put a price on watching a beautiful sunset on the beach, looking around at towering mountains, or visiting one of the Seven Wonders of the World—or can you? Housing markets provide a unique glimpse into human preferences because housing prices capture all the amenities of a particular location people are willing to pay for, including proximity to natural and man-made wonders. Living along the beach may lift your spirits, but it’s expensive.[6] People love beautiful homes and places, but it’s the rich who buy immaculate properties, take on expensive home makeovers, live along the water, travel to take in the wonders of the world, and play golf on pristine courses.

Market prices incentivize supply and ration it by willingness to pay. Developers incorporate green spaces and natural light where buyers demand them, and luxury capital summons custom timber work, fountains, and gardens into high-end hotels and restaurants. Market forces in housing, home improvement, tourism, and hospitality enable us to make places beautiful. Yet, private ownership of naturally beautiful places can fence them off to all but those with means. Who should own the beauty we inherit in nature is a more difficult political question than who should own the beauty we construct. 

Markets cater to individual desires—often focused on self, family, and friends—but much of our aesthetic experience is communal. In our finitude and self-interest, we often neglect the way our decisions shape the aesthetic experiences of others. Economists refer to costs/benefits occurring to those outside a market transaction—and thus not accounted for by markets—as externalities. It’s not just builders or landowners who receive the benefits of looking up at the city skyline or walking through a beautiful park. Externalities help explain why cities create zoning regulations,[7] why historic sites are preserved by the government, and why public resources go to museums and the arts.[8] For all markets can do, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were built by governments. One study estimated that Americans implicitly value government-funded National Park Service lands and programs at $92 billion.[9] 

Markets, governments, philanthropy, and intermediary institutions all have a role to play if we desire beautiful places for our communities. Wherever we’re failing to build and preserve beautiful places, the answer lies in fostering a society of people who have a taste for beauty and a loving desire to share it with others, and in finding mechanisms for cooperating and negotiating with each other amid our sin and finitude.

The Market for Beautifying Ourselves

If what we do with our money reveals something about our hearts, how do we assess the hundreds of billions of dollars Americans spend on our physical appearance?[10] Setting aside hygiene, health, and the functional necessity of clothing, how important is it for us to look good? Hair salons, nail salons, cosmetic surgeries, make-up, lipstick, creams, hair loss treatments, veneers, braces, acne treatments, fitness clubs, weight loss drugs, brand-name clothing, shoes, and jewelry: how much of this is good for us, and how much of it pulls us further into the insatiable black hole of vanity? Caring for our physical appearance is a natural way to steward our bodies as good gifts from God, but it can easily become an idol that lures us and poisons us.

Markets are good at giving us what we want and won’t hesitate to gratify—and even intentionally stir up—that desire. Economic growth following the Industrial Revolution has made it possible for us to have more clothing with more color and variety, an array of products enhancing our hygiene and health, and even lab-grown diamonds. And yet, we invented means of ease that led to far too sedentary lives, and the food industry employs scientists to intentionally engineer processed foods to be irresistible and addicting (and incidentally, bad for us). The resultant unrelenting demand for a cure for excess weight only joins the bigger stream of our desire to fight signs of weakness and imperfection as our bodies go through normal stages of life. No product will ever appease the bitter discontentment that can arise when we look in the mirror, but we can do our best to care for our bodies and put our hope in deeper, lasting things.[11] Government can’t save us from ourselves, but it has a proper limited role to play in regulating products and the information consumers have about them.

The Market for Beautiful Things

Economic forces heavily shape our aesthetic lives, allocating music, art, movies, television, books, live performances, and sports,[12] along with countless goods (like furniture) containing an important aesthetic component. 

Markets summon our productive capacities in the direction of what people are willing to pay for. For most goods, this mechanism outperforms central planning, because prices incorporate decentralized information and incentives in a way central planning can’t. But in an unequal world, willingness to pay reflects both preferences and ability to pay, and our preferences are often skewed and exploitable. A Taylor Swift concert may be a transcendent experience,[13] but tickets are finite resources rationed by high prices. Who goes to the orchestra? Who buys prestigious pieces of art? And at what point is it simply vain to acquire beautiful things that function as status goods, where a big part of the value is exclusivity and a credible signal of wealth?[14] 

Marxism endeavors to throw out the baby with the bath water. The promise of bread for all becomes Soviet bread lines, and Lenin’s art for the masses becomes censorship and stultifying “Socialist Realism.”[15] But we do need to wrestle with the fact that ability to pay is a big part of willingness to pay, and rich Christians in particular should consider where accumulating nice things might cross over into vanity and self-indulgence. 

Free enterprise has made possible many beautiful things in life we take for granted, like eyeglasses enabling millions to see the world more clearly, abundant pictures of loved ones, and almost limitless access to music—less than 200 years ago, one author imagined music on demand to be “the limit of felicity.”[16] We get what we pay for, and people are willing to pay for aesthetic quality. Sometimes we’ll sacrifice quality for a cheaper price, especially if we’re not exceptionally wealthy. But the onset of economic growth has put basic needs far out of sight in the rear view for most of us, so for better and worse, that frees us up to seek pleasure and entertainment with our abundant resources.

On the other hand, the things that maximize profits are not always the most beautiful things. The entertainment industry is one of scale and superstars. Most of the costs of production are up-front fixed costs (producing a song or movie), while the marginal cost of extending the product to one more listener or viewer is now often close to zero (letting one more person stream a song on Spotify or movie on Netflix); this means the profitable way to entertain is to entertain the masses. A few entertainers at the top get all the fans and fortune, while many strive in vain for attention at the bottom. Fierce competition generates high levels of excellence; and especially in the age of the internet, consumers can discover how others rate the quality of a production—for example, using Rotten Tomatoes to assess movies. But entertainment for the masses can also devolve into lowest-common-denominator art, flash over substance, and reliance on established brands and sequels rather than innovative artistic risks.[17]  

As we turn to one final market, we also must consider the attention economy. Before an entertainer can have our money, they must capture our eyes; and our attention is a limited resource. Producers compete not just to wow us with the most beautiful things, but also to do so efficiently, knowing we economize on our time and attention. It’s a shame that Colleen Hoover sells more books than Justin Bailey,[18] and that TikTok outperforms newspapers at monetizing the news. Beyond arts and entertainment, every good and service is marketed to us with the knowledge that making good things and making things attractive are two related but separate tasks.

The Market for Making Things Seem Beautiful

At its best, marketing informs, and it helps us match products to the consumers who might benefit from them. At its worst, marketing deceives. I appreciate knowing Taco Bell has a new box combo for $5. I don’t appreciate fast food companies using elaborate staging to make a burger look way better than you’d ever get at the store, and I don’t know what to think of cereal ads using glue instead of milk.  

Markets rely on and generate information about what it costs producers to make things and how consumers assess their attributes and value. Prices incentivize and inform us, and word of mouth and our past experiences help us form beliefs about the quality of a good. But our capacity for assessing quality is limited, and producers have a strong incentive to make goods appear better than they are. The government regulates false advertising, but there’s a lot of gray area when it comes to deception. Puffery—visual and verbal depictions that vaguely exaggerate the quality of a product in a way that doesn’t convey a specific statement of fact—is legal and commonplace. It’s hard to win a case against Burger King by comparing pictures of a Whopper on TV to real pictures from the restaurant.[19] 

Our world desperately needs people who won’t settle for fake things and businesspeople with the integrity to eschew deceptive marketing—I’d argue this is part of what it means to participate in the economy Christianly. As the world lies “in sin and error pining,” awaiting Christ’s return, our call is to testify against airbrushed figures of women and social media ecosystems where curated, sensationalized illusions pull our time and attention away from authentically relating to other people and creation.

He Makes Everything Beautiful in Its Time

So, does our economy cultivate beauty? Yes, in that markets, governments, and gifts allow us to enjoy and steward God’s good creation in amazing ways. No, in that markets cater to our sinful desires and can sell things deceptively, governments often make policies on behalf of those in power, and our generosity is often constrained to those in our immediate circles. 

Government policy and intermediary institutions can help us coordinate to create beauty for each other. But our economy can only truly cultivate beauty when we develop a society of people virtuous enough to create beautiful things out of generosity and to seek beauty in the wonderful works of God in nature and human culture. In a world where we’re tempted to earn others’ approval by making ourselves beautiful and making beautiful things, Christians are called to receive and respond to the beauty of God’s good design in creation. We need the Kingdom of God to enter our economic activity, as we wait for the One who makes everything beautiful in its time.[20] 

Footnotes:

1. One biologist has said, "we really do not understand exactly what females ... are doing when they evaluate males," which I think also applies to humans. https://www.science.org/content/article/peacock-feathers-thats-so-last-year
2. “Peacocking” is even a term for men showing off to stand out to women.
3. This was argued by John Ruskin and William Morris in the 19^th century in response to the Industrial Revolution. A similar argument is made in Schumacher, E. F. (1973). Small is beautiful: Economics as if people mattered. Blond & Briggs.
4. From the song “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell (1970).
5. Polanyi (1977) identifies these three categories, as referenced in Sacco et al. (2006). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/handbook/abs/pii/S1574071406010098
6. Dahal et al. found that house prices increase around $3,000 for every kilometer of added proximity to the waterfront in Mobile and around $12,000 for every kilometer in Daphne, AL. Dahal, Ram P., et al. "A hedonic pricing method to estimate the value of waterfronts in the Gulf of Mexico." Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 41 (2019): 185-194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2019.04.004
7. For example, Dutch-style storefronts are required for businesses in Orange City. As a side note, zoning regulations do create major problems when it comes to housing supply.
8. https://reader.giarts.org/read/public-funding-for-the-arts-2025
9. Haefele, Michelle, John B. Loomis, and Linda Bilmes. "Total economic valuation of the National Park Service lands and programs: Results of a survey of the American public." (2016).
10. Looking at the data, it seems we spend somewhere around $500 to $700 billion a year on our looks, depending on how much of certain industries you attribute to aesthetics rather than utility. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=53&eid=44183
11. 1 Sam. 16:7, 1 Pet. 3:3-5, 1 Tim. 4:8
12. The U.S. arts and cultural sector contributes roughly $1.2 trillion annually to GDP. https://www.arts.gov/news/press-releases/2025/arts-and-cultural-industries-grew-twice-rate-us-economy-adding-12-trillion
13. Kyle Dieleman, a professor of theology at Dordt, would affirm this claim.
14. Conspicuous consumption is a term economists have for buying expensive goods in an impractical way to credibly signal economic power in the eyes of others. Veblen, Thorstein. "The theory of the leisure class." (1899).
15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism
16. https://ordinaryabundance.com/
17. Matthews, Josh (2025, August 29). Are Movies Just Commercial Products Now? In All Things.
18. You should check out the book Discipling the Diseased Imagination. 
19. See this Q&A in Harvard Law Today: Where’s the Beef?.
20. Ecclesiastes 3:11