Two men sit, staring at a puppy. First man: "I give you the $7 billion pup, then you give me the $7 billion pup, and we've each made seven billion dollars."

- caption to a New Yorker cartoon by Barsotti

EARLIER this week, I did something I have never done before, which is usually a pretty good recipe. I had a manicure. While one hand was soaking and the other was being attended to, it struck me that what was going on was the essence of capitalism, whittled down to a 15-minute lesson.

While half the world starves, New Yorkers appear to have developed the urgent need to have manicures every hour on the hour, to judge by the number of manicurists' establishments now operating in midtown (and elsewhere, for all I know).

My demand for better manual hygiene was met by the supply of such services offered by Nails on Fifth, or whatever the store was called - and, hey presto, we were off to the capitalist races.

I could by no stretch of the imagination have needed a manicure, if I have got this far through life without ever having had one. The service was, like almost everything beyond food and shelter that capitalism spews out, utterly unnecessary. That is capitalism's greatest achievement: the endless welter of totally spurious products and services that it produces, and the economic behaviour that it encourages.

As a child, I bit my nails. As an adult, I bought a pair of nail nippers and "manicured" myself for decades. But I couldn't resist the wave of advertising that manicuring has produced in this city of late and so, without further ado, in I went. I ordered my hands cleaned up without asking the price.

The lady who worked on me was Hong Kong Chinese, I would guess. We might call her semi-skilled, in that she did things to my nails that I, a layman, could never have imagined. Her English was limited to simple phrases, such as "ten minute" and "hand here".

THIS was not a fancy uptown joint where the manicure might have cost me $100 or more, so semi-skilled we'll call her. She works on people's nails all day long and then takes home a weekly wage somewhere in the $400 range, I would guess. Tips will enhance her pay.

The whole business took about 15 minutes. It cost $9.40, by which (if you know anything about such matters) you will be able to deduce that it was a so-so job, nothing better. I have walked past that store dozens of times in the past week, and would guess that it is busy half the time. This enables us to work out easily enough the mathematics of the business.

Let's say my lady manicures twice an hour, for an average fee of $10. That's $20 an hour earned for, say, 40 hours a week. She brings in $800 for her employer weekly. She is one of six ladies in the store, so we may assume that the place grosses, say, $5,000 a week, or $250,000 a year. If each of the ladies earns $400, excluding tips, that leaves the owner $180,000 to pay the rent, keep the store clean, buy the nail files, depreciate the admittedly basic furnishings and pay corporation tax. He (if he is a he) probably takes home $75,000 a year, net.

My left-wing pals (which is most of them) will doubtless berate me for having become a capitalist monster, exploiting an expatriate Asian down on her luck. Only the rich, they might argue, would have someone else do their nails. Of course, most of these people drive giant off-road vehicles that guzzle gasoline, which explains why they were all so opposed to the war in Iraq.

In reality, my manicure was no different than the purchase of a CD or a pack of cigarettes, except that the product I purchased was purely labour and a spot of skill, rather than the packaged result of such efforts. That's why, in many ways, the manicure is a more honest transaction.

DID the manicurist feel exploited? I doubt it, especially if she was once from Hong Kong. I have seen the conditions under which she would have lived there and New York City, despite its disgusting condition, is a better place to be. In Hong Kong, for a similar service, she might have earned $1. At the end of the week, she'd have been just as badly off as she will be in New York, except that in the latter city, she has the chance to progress, whether she takes it or not.

Did I feel as if I had taken advantage of her? Not really. She didn't do a great job, she chatted to her colleague throughout, perfunctorily going through the motions rather than attempting to achieve excellence, and on my way home I had to buy a nail file to smooth out the imperfections.

Next time, I will either do it myself or go to someone who charges $100, probably the former. In the manicure market, as in so much else, the best philosophy appears to be: do it right, or don't do it at all.

I'm glad I had the experience, though. One should try everything at least once. Next week, I am considering a pedicure. There appears to be no limit to my vanity, and capitalism has people standing by to cater to whatever crazed requirement I can come up with.

That's why it has been the only working economic mechanism for the past 6,000 years, and that's why nothing is likely to replace it in the foreseeable future.