where did it all go wrong?

I paid a little over £3 for a pint of beer, in Edinburgh this week.

I paid £3 for a pair of garden shears in Tesco today. I reasoned with myself that if they were not much good, they could be disposed of at the end of the season - but on reflection, for the price of a pint, they could be disposed of at the end of the day.

But I already have a pair of garden shears. They belonged to my grandfather. He almost certainly used them for several decades. Perhaps they are of better quality - but I wouldn't bank on it.

Of course, there are many other similar examples. The supermarket sells jeans for a similar price, as does Primark. And so on. T-shirts for £1 each are not unknown - even if designer T-shirts can cost £100.

Is beer too expensive? Probably! A large part of the purchase price is tax, after all. But, of course, the real issue is that the raw materials for the shears are really cheap, and they were no doubt manufactured in a country where labour is really cheap (perhaps we could go further and say "where life is cheap" - but that may be to over-simplify the economics). In principle, we could manufacture beer in those places, too, and reduce its price - but we'd struggle to make that work satisfactorily, I suspect.

I wonder if there's a "perfect" price ratio between garden shears and pints of beer: my intuition says it should be about 10:1. When we get prices out of kilter - due to over-supply, or due to exploitation of those far away - is there are moral impact? Economics will tell us that the price of anything is all a matter of market forces, but it strikes me that a globalized market has huge potential to skew our sense of values. I don't know what the eventual hazard there might be, but it seems problematic to me.