this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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I think the 'objective' methodology for figuring that out would be either a marketing study, ethnography or something else. My rule of thumb is to see where the majority of advertising money is going. The rich and elite are usually more susceptible to advertising schemes because they have the ability to replicate the lives that marketing portrays. That is the beauty of owning massive amounts of private capital, while it is selling an unattainable material lie to us proles, it is only selling an unattainable spiritual lie (that if you are unhappy despite money and success, consumption will solve that unhappiness) to the wealthy and elite. They can actually attain the material reality portrayed in advertising, so it is just a matter of getting their eyeballs on it.
Also, within capitalism, isolation is usually the rule of thumb. The elite of capitalism wish to stand apart from the mass of humanity, as titans and utilitarian betters.
Yeah that makes sense. Would you say that rich/elite can be more susceptible due to their lack of like 'risk'? Which is just another way of describing material their wealth/resources?
Sorry for the wall of text, I'm just a bit curious about your thoughts.
I'm thinking to calculate susceptibility in a superficial way, for like success of marketing of the kind you mentioned; you get a person's susceptibility by using their 1. temperament (individual/group/cultural differences), 2. their perceived material resources say abstracted with dollars, 3. their actual material resources again with dollars for convenience, 4. randomness/pseudo-randomness to account for uh whatever stuff we don't know (if economists and population geneticists and sociologists can use it I will too!!)
There'd be another set of variables/factors based on like how much money was poured into a marketing campaign, relevance maybe, etc.
What I wanted to ask you actually, was, do you think that given this back-of-the-napkin model, would 2. be like, more often than not, the determining factor? Like would the perceived or actual resource of in terms of fiat money (so like an abstraction which can be adjusted when needed...) be more 'significant'? Where significance is like a relative weighting of the two terms...
What really gets me is the "It's a banana, how much could it cost?" and like recently when the Brtsh PM tried to buy stuff from a grocery checkout; the level of disconnect is just so much more that I think I could have imagined. If you gave a prize to like how out of touch, they are, I'm sure I'd be completely off the mark. So I'm trying to bridge that gap in understanding
Yeah, what do you think?
I honestly think that the significance difference would be related more to the individual temperament than the perceived v.s. actual material value. The problem is that both of those things influence each other, so the randomness.
The statement (in words) would be like this, the weighted significance between perceived v.s. actual material value is a variable that is tied towards the individual's temperament, up to a point where actual material value reaches some arbitrary threshold of say 100 million dollars, where it then becomes negligible, but then it is entirely a factor of the individual's temperament. However, I also believe that one's temperament is also affected as a variable of one's actual wealth, however this is then a classic nature v.s. nurture problem, and while we can get it into set theory, we cannot solve which comes first, we just have to start taking data and testing our weighted categories against actual material results.
Ah yeah, thanks for the response and discussion. Your final sentence, yeah, conjecture & hypothesizing w/o data can only get you so far. I was honestly on that rationalist train for a while and it still bleeds through with fantastical imaginary models. Need to touch grass every so often (i.e. deal with real world data).
I'm always super astonished though how some people, like Popper, Hayek, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx/Engels; managed to have such elaborate and interesting models and conceptions without the kind of like data available now. I put in Hayek and Popper, they really were off the mark on some spots I think (I'm trying to go through their work to see what libs/neocons like about it, whatever they self-report on what they like is really not helpful and a bit incomprehensible to me) and it really seems, as a consequence of their material conditions & environment, what these economists/thinkers thought actually did make sense from their POV. It really wracks my brain.
Most neocons and libs haven't actually read Popper, Jevons or Hayek. And even if theu did, most of them are pretty reductive modelers, Popper intentionally so. Ultimately, they are just intellectual veneers for arguing for the continuation of things, Hayek and Jevons in particular the maximization of the creation of Money in the Money-Commodity-Money cycle, even going so far as a M-M cycle, because in their mind money is commodity value, even though we know that money that cannot translate into commodities is useless, power lies in the ability to marshall productive labor and control commodity production, which currency is pretty good at, but you can absolutely bypass it. Which is why no current national economic model actually follows Austrian economics, even if certain companies do.
Yeah that's fair. I was looking at it because I am working on a genealogy of economic & sociological thought. It's necessary to drudge through the mud and see what I can get. Hayek really didn't like the over-reliance on statistics or comprehensive models... imaginary stuff seemed to be the best for him.