The rose and Valentines Day are synonymous thanks to both romantics and economics. (Well, more economics.)
If you have received or gifted flowers today i.e. on Valentines Day, chances are roses were involved. It is a flower that is now seen as an integral part of the concept of romance and of V-day. Do a google search and you will find romantic and aesthetic reasons galore behind why it is so popular on 14th February, and how it became an undisputed and universal symbol of love. But dig a little deeper and the shadow of economics and that of economists like David Ricardo will loom large.
Welcome to another edition of ruining-valentines-day-with-econ.
There are two main forces that have pushed the rose to the forefront - the first one is something we have discussed before about being an econ force that moves the needle in matters of pop culture: bandwagon demand, and the second - which applies to everything from smartphones to microchips to Barbie dolls - the familiar economics of how explosive economic growth forced modern supply chains to go global.
Lady Mary (Wortley Montagu, not Crawley, the one from Downton Abbey) was a pioneer in many things, including introducing smallpox inoculation to England, but to our story, her contribution is a series of letters she wrote when in Constantinople about the Turkish flower "language" selam - "the Turkish tradition as a way of assigning meaning to objects in order to send secret love letters". There she claimed that the rose symbolised love, and over the next couple of centuries, through a series of translations and other writings, the idea took hold in England. It did not matter that her original understanding was not entirely correct - the secret 'language' was about rhyming words with the object to decipher the meaning, and the object itself had no symbolism attached. The tradition grew and with the first wave of globalisation in the 20th Century, it went global. Traditions - whether it is buying a Christmas tree, or a turkey at Thanksgiving - tend to be driven by bandwagon demand effect (see footnote 1), everyone wants to do it because everyone else is doing it. The feedback loop meant demand exploded as Valentine's Day, driven by global corporations, became big business. Today, more roses (by some estimates, 250 - 300 million) are sold worldwide on Feb 14, than all other days of the year combined. This brings us to our second point.
Back in the day giving flowers on Valentines Day was already a thing, but most people made do with locally grown flowers. However as the day became even more popular, despite the best efforts of your (un)friendly neighbourhood fringe activist group, florists realised the local supply would not be able to scale up. But with the key markets, like the US, and Europe, in the depths of winter (well, because northern hemisphere), the flowers would have to be grown far away and transported. And anyone who has ever had to even travel across town with a bouquet knows, it is hard to transport flowers. The rose won out because of that reason.
The flower would have to be grown in the southern hemisphere and would have to survive thousands of miles of travel in boxes. Let's just say, the rose refused to wilt, or as Planet Money's Robert Smith put it: "Roses were the perfect choice (because they were) pretty much indestructible." The globalised world that moved to mass production thanks to the economics of consumerism operates on optimised supply chains that can produce things where they are cheapest (and/or conditions are ideal; basically an extension of David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage) and then send them where they need to be sold. In the rose and Valentines Day's case, it was growing roses in Colombian greenhouses and transporting them to Miami.
Much like how Pablo Escobar optimised the global supply chain for cocaine, only legal, and with no hit Netflix series about them. It could have been other flowers too, but the unit economics worked best with the rose. In other words, just like economics made cocaine the party drug of choice, and fueled addiction, we do not get to choose the rose on Valentines Day because we are upholding some long held tradition, it is just that the market has optimised the production for it.
So, in case you are reading this on 14th February (anyway, the heck are you doing reading econ articles on the evening of Valentines Day?) and there is bouquet of roses you have either given or received, you can thank Lady Mary, David Ricardo, and the weird world of economics.
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