A handwoven shawl costs far more than a machine-made one, even though making the machine-made…

Why

Meena has a real factor in her rule — effort genuinely does play a part in what things are worth, and skilled hand-weaving does take real time and care. The gap is treating effort as the WHOLE story when several other things shape a price at the same time. A machine can turn out hundreds of shawls a day, so each one is common — not scarce — even though the machine itself took effort to run. A hand-woven shawl takes one weaver many days to make just one, so far fewer exist, and rare things tend to command higher prices simply because there is less of them to go around. On top of that, buyers are often willing to pay more for a skill that machines can't easily copy, and for owning something genuinely one-of-a-kind. Test: a hand-drawn portrait usually costs more than a printed photo, even though the photo needed a real photographer's effort too — because the drawing is scarce, skilled, and unique in a way the photo isn't. No, scarcity, skill and demand matter too: effort is one ingredient in price, not the only one, and how rare or wanted something is changes the price just as much.