A student in my class explains that the market is full of sugary sweets because the elites have purposely lured us. They -- the elites have this name "they" -- give us sweets as children to hook us on sugar so that we want more as adults. Then we get fat and diabetic and become the stooges for Big Pharma. It's a conspiracy.
A another student insists that the reason women are sold jeans with fake or shallow pockets is because "they" -- fashion industry? -- want to compel women into buying expensive handbags. Corporate conspiracy.
A third student introduces all his comments with "I think the elites are trying to get us to...".
These analyses of the market seem reasonable. The pieces of the puzzles all fit. There's an inevitable logic to it. And these explanations are insightful, a credit to whoever came up with them. To accept such views is not only to be logical but to be insightful beyond the surface of the world, seeing into the depths of how everything actually works, and not just insightful but sort of heroic, since the way the world works is nefarious with greedy agents undermining the innocent, ordinary citizens who deserve better.
All very logical, insightful and heroic until you recognize the all too obvious. Why don't fashion designers market fake pockets to men? Why not induce soy bean addiction by feeding children tofu?
Because in western culture, men won't buy pants without practical pockets, plain and simple. (If you're interested in why pockets are so essential to western masculinity, take a look at this.) Why doesn't Big Agri addict the public on soy beans? Because the public doesn't like them enough. Because they're not sweet. Because humans like sweets and get addicted to them. Go look at hunter-gatherers like the hadza and you'll see they smoke out beehives to steal their honey. Nobody's making money off that. They don't have a cabal of elites.
More of the obvious: if elites were running the show, why aren't the railroad magnates of the Gilded Age still calling the shots? How did the auto industry replace it? Why aren't the auto CEO's all descendants of the rail magnates? And why are the largest corporations in the world not railroads, not cars, but info-tech?
Because the elites don't run the market. It's the consumer at the bottom, not the wealthy at the top. Schumpeter's creative destruction is driven by innovation and consumerism. The elites have a temporary effect on the market. If you want to look into the future, you'd need to know the innovations of the future, and you can't know those or they'd already exist (hat tip to David Deutsch). At best you can guess what people will want. That's not always so easy, since trends are like the law of unintended consequences. They are not only unpredictable, they are absurd. In my neighborhood, waiting an hour on line to get a novel bagel is now a sign of prestige. The trendy consumer actually brags about it. Some years ago Richard Ocejo wrote a dissertation on the trend in my neighborhood for recreations of authenticity (an absurd contradiction in itself) amidst gentrification -- not looking for the newest, most convenient and most efficient, but things like spending money and time on a visit to a barber for a shave: old-school, except the barber is a hipster. Only the most imaginative scifi authors could come up with these aberrations, and since useless deviations are infinitely more various than the useful, which are restricted to real efficiencies and real needs, only an infinity of sci-fi authors could predict at best the range of possibilities.
Any entrepreneur knows that in the market place, the consumer leads. The elites -- whoever they are -- follow. There's plenty of corporate shenanigans to manipulate the consumer, but that's more back seat driving. The consumer, on the other hand, is a kind of monopoly. If bros want to wear nothing but T-shirts and jeans with at least five pockets, it's vastly easier to supply them with those than to cook up ploys to get them to like something else that might fail anyway, and all that investment lost. Marketing is all about figuring out what people want, what people will fall for. It's all about the psychology of what appeals to consumers. It's a study, not a practice of hypnotism or a bootcamp for militaristic coercion.
Conspiracy theorists assume that corporate elites are all working in concert, a monolith manipulating us, controlling us, deceiving us. Quite aside from the mysteriousness of who these elites are -- we'll get to that -- there's this suspicion that some cabal is in control and we're not.
Far from the truth. The nature of the market is that the capitalist follows the market and has only limited ability to manipulate. A cartel can choose to produce electric bulbs with planned obsolescence, but only if you want electric lights in the first place. And you want electric lights not because GE hypnotized you into desiring them. GE makes the bulbs because they are so incredibly useful to the consumer. Who is driving that market? It's the consumer -- you -- not them.
A friend and fellow blogger complains that AI will make billions for the billionaires, but won't make ordinary people's lives better. That's all backwards. No benefit to the consumer, no billions to the rich. That's what a market is all about, and that's why entrepreneurs get into the market -- the inexhaustible wants of the consumer. There will also be military contracts and plenty of other government projects, but the big money is in the vast distributed consumer market. Even many of those government projects are developed to placate constituencies.
The danger of the market is not elite manipulation. Quite the opposite. The consumer wants instant gratification, convenience, comfort, and too much of those are maladaptive to our evolution. Like sugar? Have as much as you want. Is it good? Oh so very good. Is it good for you? ...? With our tech, there's no more need to walk or orient oneself, no need to write or think about one's writing. Already my CUNY students tell me that an anecdote using the cardinal directions is meaningless to them. What other cognitive abilities will erode? We've lost so many skills since the agricultural revolution and even more since the industrial.
On the other hand, Gen Z have much easier access to information than any generation prior. But doesn't that just mean more fuel for their confirmation bias and polarization? That will be a tech-generated social dysfunction.
In the remote past, humans struggled to survive and did it together; now we struggle against our own personal excesses, desires, motivations and now, motivated cognitions. No doubt tech will someday resolve those as well. Someday, not today.
And so it is with all markets. It's the consumer that leads, the producer the sycophantic follower. The irony, of course is that the scale of the deal means that while the consumer gets what it wants in real wealth (electric lights or a computer-cum-phone-cum-recorder-cum-camera-cum-screen-cum-map-cum-factotem in your pocket) and the producer gets financial wealth, often obscene financial wealth. And why does the producer get so rich? Because the consumer likes. And once the consumer has become dependent on it -- what the economists call sticky demand -- then the corporates can manipulate more effectively with, for example, planned obsolescence.
Consumer control is most evident in news media. Chomsky's manufacturing consent ignores the complexity of the information market. The NYTimes reader prefers to read the NYT rather than watch Fox because the reader -- the information consumer -- has already chosen what to expect. The Times can at best give the consumer what it wants. To change the consumer would risk losing that market share of the audience. To lose the audience would be to lose the advertisers, who pay for access to that audience. It's not a conspiracy. It's a market. It's not the elites running the Times, it's the Time's consumer running the Times.
(An acquaintance complains that the newspapers report only what their corporate donors want reported. Conspiracy thinking often begins with a lack of knowledge and a theory of distrust filling the vacuum of knowledge. Newspapers don't have corporate donors. They have advertisers looking for a specific audience. Each news venue targets a specific market share of the public. Catering to it includes spinning the news to conform to the audiences biases, and if there's competition for that market share, as the WaPo and the NYT do, they each have to cover any news item that might be interesting to the audience regardless of their bias, otherwise their competition might cover it and lure their audience away. In response to his complaint, I google-searched "union busting at Amazon and Tesla". Both WaPo and NYT reported multiple times, however the Times reported on Amazon union busting more frequently than the WaPo, which is owned by Bezos, exec. chair of Amazon. Why does the WaPo report on it? Obviously, if it didn't it would lose market share, and embarrass itself as well. Why did the NYT report on it so frequently? Probably to embarrass WaPo and get an edge. It's a comedy of competition, not a corruption scheme paid for by mysterious donors. I venture to guess that my acquaintance never actually read the NYT or WaPo.)
The information market has the important consequence that propaganda does not change people's views. It confirms or validates the views they already have or already want to have. Propaganda can rally the faithful or direct their actions, but not convert. It can convince but not persuade, that is, it can give the readers more confidence in their bias. And a further consequence: censorship -- successful suppression of information -- may be more dangerous than propaganda. Propaganda can polarize dangerously, but censorship can leave the public entirely deceived, on the one hand, and distrustful of the censor, on the other. Censorship is the germ of conspiracy theory suspicion.
What the market shows is not an elite leading and manipulating us. It shows a systematic market failure: the market gives you what you want, you become dependent, and too much of what you want is not good for you. It's not a conspiracy. It's a great big stupid dog chasing its own tail into exhaustion. The invisible hand is not a dark, clever, deceptive secret ruse; it's a vacant-minded onanistic dysfunction. The invisible hand is secret -- a secret, addicted wanker.
No comments:
Post a Comment