This article is pretty out of date. Man-made diamonds are now common, and the price of diamonds is about 1/3rd of what it used to be, and the margins at retail are considerably smaller. There are more countries producing diamonds, etc.
Also the pricing of diamonds is much less wild than he states. I think the author was not in the diamond business.
Try substituting flowers in, and the article mostly stands (dates and companies changed). Turns out, they are a shitty investment, spoil pretty quickly, and do nothing but signify romantic interest and pretty-up a small area for a little bit of time. Just like jewelry.
If you ignore the social signaling value of everything, and reduce it to it's baseline economic story, then yeah, a lot of normal things start to look like bullshit.
Diamond and flower giving are two (of many) things that illuminate our simple animal beginnings as a species. People chuckle watching a Bowerbird spend days collecting and curating color coordinated piles of petals to attract a mate yet don’t see the irony in then spending many months of money on a useless rock.
Flowers are (1) much cheaper and (2) more sustainable. Also, to my mind, flowers are more beautiful in many cases.
Diamonds of very moderate sizes can still make good jewellery, e.g. in earrings. The biggest problem with the diamond engagement rings is that they are collecting dust after the wedding. Long-term diamond jewellery may be more cost-effective than flowers :)
Almost half of all marriages result in divorce, so Craigslist is a good place to start. You'll want to have the item evaluated at a reputable jeweler, and work out a fee in advance, but you can save a fortune that way. I think the mindset for a lot of sellers is that they just want to put their past behind them and aren't concerned with getting top dollar.
With such inflated prices and a lack of resell channels, you'd think the diamond market would be great for a healthy second-hand market. Why is there none yet?
But it's still better not to buy into the scam in the first place.
I'm not American, and Dutch culture has no special preference for diamond rings. (Just plain gold wedding rings.) Or at least didn't; it wouldn't surprise me if this scam has also been crossing the pond like so many other questionable ideas.
I had to fight my Chinese wife's tooth and nail not to play in that shame game "but everyone else has a huge diamond ring". My god, get it yourself, it's just a ring, I won't do like some friends who borrow on 5 years to buy one so big the girl is scared to wear it and put it in a safe...
I bought her a small 300 euros one, she found it almost insulting but after a month, stopped wearing it "because it's a bit heavy" and "it's just a ring, it's true it doesn't really matter". 5 years later, we're still married with a child and she wouldn't even remember where she put the "diamond".
I'm no expert in this, but I'd assume this works the same way as any other market for used items: those who will resell your item will pay a lot less for it so there's margin for them to make a profit.
Very few of my friends in same-sex marriages exchanged diamonds, with many forgoing any sort of engagement ring. Maybe we get to be on the vanguard of style and custom again and start an anti-diamond engagement ring trend.
A typical tale of monopolistic control of supply and distribution, colonial exploitation, marketing propaganda, and bribing or colluding with elites to ignore obvious anti-trust violations, then diminish the cost of any face-saving convictions.
Why was De Beers not cut up by anti-trust legislation much earlier? This kind of monopolistic behaviour is probably worse than anything Standard Oil or AT&T has ever done.
The problem is they are extremely international and decentralised, and they don’t have any significant capital infrastructure in well regulated countries. This means if any country went after them, they’d just move operations somewhere else in a matter of a couple of days. International cooperation on things like this is notoriously difficult.
Diamonds are actually breakable, and not all that hard to break, if you hit them along the right axis. Diamond cutters use chisels, and that's enough to split a diamond.
I think you’re thinking of “unscratchable”. Diamonds are extremely hard and nearly impossible to scratch. But hardness is usually a trade off with elasticity, so they are also very brittle and therefore pretty “easy” to break.
Also the pricing of diamonds is much less wild than he states. I think the author was not in the diamond business.