 This is a story about a bicycle factory. It's about the lost connection with the people who make things and the failings of economics to help us understand value. I took my son to visit a small factory in France. I was going to watch a bicycle being built. He was going to watch from a safe distance. Bernard, a master craftsman with nearly 30 years' experience, began by selecting the tubes, the steel rods that he would join to make the frame. As the cutting began in the clash of machine and metal, I began to see the beauty in the process, a process in which some parts were done precisely to the fraction of a millimetre and some parts were done by eye. Then something unexpected happened. As I watched my son, he began to stand closer and closer. He was soon transfixed, and I began to wonder how many things in his life has he ever seen being built before? Most of the things in his life arrive finished, pre-packaged. Doesn't that make it harder for him to understand what things are worth? I know that in economic terms something can be worth $10 one moment, $0.10 the next. But that's not what we think of when we think of value. We're asking what does it mean, what's its value to us? What's it really worth? What transforms something from a commodity into something we cherish is how it makes us feel. And when we understand how something's made, we understand the work that people have put into things. When we get that, we get a unique personal connection. And when we have a personal connection, something amazing happens. We get a value that even though we add it to the product, it comes back to us. And the bonus is it can keep coming. Over time it doesn't diminish with use. Now my bicycle was being made by some master craftsmen and women, clearly. But the same thing is true for cookies baked by a child. Your feelings for the child enhance the cookie. You add your emotions to the mixture. In general, our enjoyment of a product is a combination of its objective criteria, its price, fit for purpose, expected lifespan, plus subjective values that we put on the thing. And this is where a connection with the maker comes in. Now we live in a society where we've lost most of these connections. We don't buy bread from a baker, we don't buy milk from a farmer. And I'm not saying to find happiness, we have to become agrarian traders. But what I am saying is that when we can make a connection, connection between our things and the people who make them, we get a number of real benefits. Number one, we enjoy things more. For the same price, we get more out of them. Two, they last longer because we tend to take better care of things that we like. And three, we buy less stuff because it's more fulfilling to be surrounded by things that we really appreciated. Now for my son, this was just a short trip to one factory. But hopefully he'll grow up to see that the things in his life carry the fingerprints of the people who've made them. Thank you very much.