Economy
Notes
- Capitalism = making money through ownership of capital rather than purely by labour.
- Desire is suffering. Advertising induces desire to generate economic activity, and so could be construed as a form of paid torture.
- We're kept on the "hamster wheel" by a carrot, not a stick.
- It is undeniably true that we don't need the overwhelming majority of things consume be happy. People have found happiness without being rampant consumers for thousands of years. Unfortunately, advertising has directly influenced people's ability to find happiness without consumption. The problem is not everyone can consume everything they believe is required to be happy. Furthermore, many people give up work/life balance or go into debt-slavery in order to try and consume their way to happiness. As a result, people who might otherwise be happy are made unhappy by in significant part by advertising.
- Even worse, if you actually do reach your consumption quota, you find it doesn't make cause lasting happiness. Most people infer that the answer is to consume more, and they end up killing themselves on the hedonic treadmill.
Links
- Economic Research at the St. Louis Fed - Expand the frontier of economic knowledge by producing high-quality original research in the areas of macroeconomics, money and banking, and applied microeconomics.
- Self-signaling and diagnostic utility in everyday decision making (2001) - "self-signaling" is one of the more interesting concepts to come out of behavioral economics. The idea is that some of our behaviors (especially economic behaviors) are really about telling yourself something about yourself. (Tweet)
Last modified 29d ago