It may seem like winning a valuable diamond is an unalloyed victory. It’s not. It’s not even clear that a diamond is so valuable.
Season 5, Episode 4
In part one (“Diamonds Are a Marriage Counselor’s Best Friend“), we meet Jason and Kristen Sarata, a couple who win a diamond at a charity event. But the two can’t agree on whether to sell the diamond or keep it. Luckily, investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein has written an entire book about selling a diamond, and tells us it’s unclear whether diamonds are as valuable as Marilyn Monroe taught us to think they are.
On this week’s Freakonomics Radio, we meet a young Michigan couple who win a diamond at a charity event and then can’t decide what to do with it. Sell? Set it in a ring? Or stash it in the laundry room and just keep fighting about it? We also hear from Edward Jay Epstein, who wrote a book about trying to resell a diamond, and we learn the strange, shady history of how diamonds have come to be as “valuable” as they are.
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