Inequitable wealth distribution is key to marketing consumer goods

[1932]

I'm reading The Health of Nations: Why Inequality is Harmful to Your Health, by Ichiro Kawachi and Bruce Kennedy. It argues that inequality of wealth is very important element that helps corporations sell things to people that they don't need.

When there are huge differences in wealth, new products start as luxury goods that only a few people can afford. They become available to more and more people as they become mass produced and their cost lowers. Marketers use that earlier sense of exclusivity to create a desire for the product in order to get people to buy something they might not otherwise desire.

For example, say a new product is marketed that is within everyone's financial grasp. Without the impression of exclusivity surrounding the product, people will make their own personal (and rational) calculations about whether they need it. If they don't buy it, they don't feel like they're not keeping up with the Joneses. They simply decided they didn't want it and there's no shame in not having it.

One of the pieces of evidence supprting this argument is that the more equitably wealth is distributed in a country, the less is spent in that country on advertising (such as Sweden). Why? Because it's not an efficient use of money to advertise products when it's so hard to manufacture desire for the product. In societies with the biggest polarizations of wealth, advertising expenditures are the highest. Why? Because it is an effective use of money to prod people to buy something by manipulating people's desires to be affulent through advertising.

Now, considering that polarizations of wealth and poverty are so important to marketers ability to sell people goods they don't need (and that don't have social value, and include a markup that comes from psychological desires) is it any wonder that corporate America seems to have such an overwhelming interest in maintaining inequality that goes beyond simply wanting to elect Republicans who lower their tax bill on capital gains and dividend income?

If we had a fairer society, corporate American would have to actually work hard to produce goods that people couldn't be manipulated into desiring, but which brought actual value to their lives and to society.

[Child_Of_Isis]

1. It is pretty sickening

when a country revolves around nothing but money. We used to stand for something. Somebody stop the world and let me off.

[1932]

2. Interestingly, the problem the US has vs the rest of the world

(we stand for hollow, ridiculous values of greed and wealth polarization) is the problem the Democrats are having vs Republicans. People think they know what the Republicans stand for (low taxes and an itchy trigger finger to keep you safe) but they have no idea what the Democrats stand for because Democrats don't make a coherent argument based on important values and ideas.

In the same way that this is making Democrats lose against Republicans, it's making the US weaker against the world.

There's nothing like a powerful idea based on good values to make a group or a society strong enough to weather the storms. As a country, we no longer have that.

[Child_Of_Isis]

3. People think they know what the Republicans stand for

Think is the keyword here. They no longer stand for anything but hatred.

[1932]

4. Republicans really stand for greed and wealth polarization

and to be fair, so do many Democrats who advocate balanced budget bills, who want tax capital gains and dividend income at progressive rates, and who vote for free trade bills.

When you really stand for greed and wealth polarization, you have to pretend you stand for something else. For Republicans, that's national security, patriotism, and a bizarre hybrid survival of the fittest entrepreneurialism cloaking a corporate welfare state.