There’s probably no doubt that someone like Jens Voigt, Heinrich Haussler or Andy Schleck could win a bicycle race on a lesser bike than the one they’re sponsored to use. There’s also no doubt that we can enjoy other things like listening to music and going for a run and enjoy the experience without spending up big. But, I have a theory that finding the precise balancing point of form-function-price is going to be as elusive as finding an alien signal via SETI, so long as we allow the death grip the marketing profession continues to inflict on these trying, post-Copenhagen times.

As we launch off into the teen years of this new era where ecology and economics have, finally, declared open-war, the search for more modest consumerist satisfactions will become ever more important. Sometime soon, the all consuming flood tide of culture change will start to recognise excess as the new ultimate social fopaux. Conspicuous consumption will become the baggage of the ‘naughties; that odious era of the Global Financial Crisis and government bailouts for those who should, more reasonably, be left to float in the bilge of their own vile excess. Lean footprint consumption should be the meme for these new teen aged years of this, our 21st Century.

But the challenges presented by the necessary purge-we-have-to-have, have me worried. You see, marketing can corset flabby reality under the disguise of an iron spun PR girdle. To play the new ‘lean is keen’ game of what should be a genuinely enlightened new era, we’re going to have to shove the virus of marketing hype and vacuous spin into the airlock and open the door. All those marketing campaigns proclaiming ‘eco-sensitive’ SUV’s, the virtues of weight-loss pills and zero-footprint bottled mineral water: out they go! Into the airlock. It’s going to be harder to insult our intelligence with junk like this as we enter these more jaded, post failed-Copenhagen years.

But, never underestimate the cleverness of the dark marketing arts. These black witches work on the very gravity well of our souls: our ego’s. Those master-builders of fallacious social constructs are out there and looking for prey. How many fell for the clean-green claims for enviro-fouling SUV’s? How many sucked the slop of Emissions Trading Schemes as the panacea of all our collective, accumulated enviro-evils? And who fell for the abject nonsense of carbon-offset air travel?!

I declare that the overriding sign that we are ready willing and able to grow up and face the consequences of our environmentally-destructive actions is a new-found cynicism for ALL marketing campaigns. Will the human race evolve to become self-aware of the manipulations of the marketing machine? Our progress will pace that emergence via the rise of a degree of cynicism that has, hitherto, been a commodity rarer than diamond and more valuable than fresh air.

So, to return to my opening point, the new crusade to launch at the dawn of this new decade is a new search for truth; the truth of our real needs as opposed to the needs we think or are told we should have. To focus on an example close to the home zone of my own obsessive pile: how can and should I choose my next bicycle? If I need a next bicycle at all.

As a rampaging subjectivist (truth is in the eye of the beholder), it’s a little perverse that I am about to contemplate objectivist choices all of a sudden. But perhaps mathematics can, indeed, help us out. Imagine an equation wherein we could measure up all the attributes of a bicycle (or a new refrigerator, a new car if you must, or a new TV…) that best suits the needs we might claim are in need of a fix. There’s two sides to this equation. On one side are the attributes of the thing we want. On the other are attributes of the needs we are attempting to fulfil.

Let’s take the attributes of the thing we think we need. If it’s a racing bike that’s desired, and racing is the thing you want to do, then the key elements are weight, mechanical efficiency, reliability and handling. All these attributes are somewhat hazy and imprecise for sure, but we can at least have a go at filing our facts on the decision tree. Notice what’s missing here? All those bits to do with ‘image’ and apparent prestige. Forget those bits for now. Do as wine tasters do and white out the brand. Taste our choices blind to makers names and the like.

Now let’s look at the mathematical bits on the other side. Let’s look at needs. This is the wild side of just about any of the choices we make. Extract, with the dedication of a surgeons knife, the tumours and related extraneous growths our egos tend to impose. What are the real needs? The real needs… other than for meeting the demands our tyrannical ego’s usually impose. If your need is to go fast, suffer a minimum of mechanical failure and to be as unimpeded by technology to put all the power you genuinely command onto the road in the form of speed, we can start to fill in the equation with some realistic facts. If, on the other hand, the real need you have is to look like a Fred, that’s revealing too. In that case, do us all a favour and buy a car instead.

OK. If we populate our equation with as much in the way of measurable or at least vaguely quantifiable data as possible (which means that the machinations of our egos and the related panderings of marketing spin have been removed), we can get down to work. The results might prove to be a surprise.

I’d be willing to make a bet. If we could take such a clinical calculation, unclouded by the fictions of marketing spin, most of us would be best served by significantly more humble choices than the choices we’d ordinarily make. I’d probably be choosing a mid-range Giant instead of a top-end Colnago. Ultegra over Dura Ace. Chorus over Super Record. In a different space, that might mean a 40 inch TV over a 50 or 60. K-Mart shorts over Gucci … Blundstones over Prada. You name it. Once we de-spin the choices once poisoned via that odious orgy of marketing in perpetual copulation with ego, these new lean, more enlightened times should, indeed, be freed to take a firmer hold. I am going to proclaim this new post-Copenhagen, post-top heavy governmentalism, post-consumerism era to be the dawn of our necessary ‘Ultegra-Chorus Years’. Hallelujah.

I was clopping the 50 metres up the local mall to fetch my papers – a distance which is the feasible limit for walking in cleated road cycling shoes – when a lady enquired about the price and availability of said shoes as it was her intention to buy a pair for her son-in-law. Which, apart from making her the world’s best mother-in-law, invoked a response to which I am not sure she was completely prepared. Actually, the answer I gave put her into something like a logic loop spin.

Which got me to wondering about the curiously asymmetrical dimensions of value. I’d always thought that, though involving of large amounts of cash, investment in the numerous accoutrements of cycling is just part of the scenery of being a cyclist. To me, the expense of these things causes pain, but not shock. And there’s not much of a notion that these expenses can be successfully avoided; no shoes, no ride.

Then I thought, what does it cost to shoe a car in tyres for a year? $800 for a set? More? What does it cost to keep that pile of stinking tin fuelled and oiled for a year? What does it take to payoff the local Road Mafia with taxes and insurance contributions?

But I don’t want to talk about the comparative costs of motoring vs. cycling here. I just want to consider the comparative mindsets of value folk tend to apply when they consider one thing over another. Here’s my main point: what happens when one applies a car driver’s mental model of ‘value’ to the parallel universe of cycling? What happens when you attempt to go all ‘accountant’ on comparisons like this? Does the ensuing benefit cost ratio of cars vs. bikes actually make sense?

Yes and no. Yes, you an make comparisons like this and bikes might come out on top (depending on the creativity of the calculations which might or might not include things like ‘opportunity cost of longer commuting time through cycling for fabulously overpaid senior executives’ vs. the ‘net present value of accumulated health benefits valued in extra productive time spent behind the desk for fabulously overpaid senior executives’ vs. ‘the net social loss from loosing said overpaid cycling super executive from the economic gene pool via the statistically higher chance of being run over by a lesser economic agent – like – gasp! an unemployed person – driving a car …’ ). No, because these two worlds involve an entirely different metric for value (time spent riding is not valued the same way as time spent driving because people with intelligence could not possibly enjoy their time behind the wheel vs time spent blissfully pedalling…).

No, I want to just suggest that the idea of valuing the cycling experience cannot and should not be undertaken from the perspective of ‘Car Mind’. That’s like trying to value the exhibits in the Museo National de Prado in Madrid via the cost of paint, boards and paintbrush depreciation. The answers won’t make sense.

Which is why so many motor-heads simply cannot comprehend the amounts we cyclists spend on our bikes and related gear. They scratch their heads in disbelief that anyone could possibly spend $600 on cycling shoes … and then run off to buy a pair of Gucci loafers for $700 enroute to get their cars re-tyred for a mere $1k. No. Car Mind is the wrong space through which to consider bikes. But the universal extension of Car Mind to things non-motoring is precisely why our planet is screwed! If you extend the curiously deranged psychoses it takes to belong to the game of cars, we start to get all manner of stuff ideo-valued via the same metric that gave us traffic jams, global warming and ‘Made in China’ stickers on everything we own.

If the sort of mental model that can accept spending $50k on a lump of fume-spewing tin is then applied to the other choices we make, it’s no wonder we get curiosities like driving to the gym; spending $100k+ to be guide-handled to the top of Mt Everest, big game bwana hunting, personal trainers, and that ultimate statement of a species in terminal decline: the drive thru takeaway! It’s no wonder that our forests are converted into toilet paper and packaging for McFat Bugers. Our value systems are screwed. Car Mind is exercising too much influence over the choices we make. It’s like seeing the world through the eyes of a virus. A bad, neurotic, evil virus.

So, next time someone asks ‘how much for those shoes’, the answer I should provide is ‘pure air and freedom’. That’s how much.

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