Opinion Editorial February, 2026: The Price is Right
There was a time long ago when calculating the price of a piece of land was simple. An indigenous community would have been established for multiple generations. Its population would have grown and eventually internal conflicts would have arisen. Most often, those conflicts would have been over competition for the land's resources — food, water and shelter in the simplest case.
A breakaway group would leave the origin community after deciding that the price of doing so was right. That price was only calculated as the risk of breaking away. Once a suitable, new piece of land was found it did not have a price because no humans lived there.
This simple process describes tens of thousands of years of hunter-gatherer survival as we eventually populated the whole planet.
Beginning around 12,000 years ago, the invention of farming was the onset of sedentary communities. With surpluses of resources — this time much more than just food, water and shelter — consideration of the right price took place in the context of barter. A common example would have been the right price for an item of clothing — which might have been two small clay pots.
So it was ten years ago in the small Andean town of San Francisco de Tilcara, Jujuy Province, northwest Argentina when I took this month's photo. This tourist was shopping for an item of clothing. While I didn't witness the final price she paid, I observed buyer and seller barter until the price was right for both. I have engaged in similar transactions hundreds of times.
Although modern commerce and the global economy have their roots in the barter system, many people are surprised to learn how common barter still is in many parts of the world. And the concept of the price being right is still universal even if its calculation is more complex.
One complex example is citizenship. Many countries have recently introduced schemes to sell citizenship. Prices differ but the schemes are generally available only to wealthy individuals. No country has ever set a "right price" to sell citizenship to every inhabitant of another country. Yet that is exactly what the United States considered doing last month for the inhabitants of Greenland.
I can't imagine how the right price could be calculated. (An article by Reuters last month suggests between USD 10,000 and 100,000 per inhabitant.) In any case, it is the land and its resources, not the people, that the US wants. Ironically, Greenlanders themselves cannot buy the land they inhabit. Even if they could and Greenland then became a US state, they would continue to be indigenous Inuit people. Indigeneity has never had a right price and it never will.
Human life itself also has a price we found out last month. According to the latest update of the Doomsday Clock it is 85 seconds. According to the Chinese Communist Party it is the price paid for running online scamming centers.
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