By Mike I’m not the first person to point out that choosing between consumer products is not at all the same thing as having control of your life in any real sense. Or that meaningless consumer choices are used as a distraction from real choices, even a substitute for democracy. For instance, we can get a cheap burger at McDonald’s or at Burger King, but that doesn’t mean we can find meat that wasn’t pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, let alone avoid the consequences of making such meat even if we don’t buy it (consequences like superbugs).
So today I saw a great satire of that system–a fake gum that took the celebration of meaningless choice to absurd levels. Complete with a Pythagoras quote: “Choices are the hinges of destiny.”
Did I say fake? I mean real. The satire is unintentional.
By Mike I created the quiz here. Check your Mussolini IQ!
The piece began as a discussion about how surprising it is that a Mussolini hasn’t arisen in the US yet. After all, we have the two necessary ingredients: broken politics and an angry, desperate population. All you need is a politician who directs that anger at the right people and promises (and delivers) some real benefits.
So far, the politicians who try to help us, and those who channel our anger, have been different politicians, but that may change. Certainly, it’s hard to argue that our current politicians are any more sane or restrained than Mussolini. As the quiz shows.
It’s also worth pointing out that there’s hope: while conditions are right for a Mussolini, they’re also right for a Roosevelt. Although maybe that’s hoping for lightning to strike twice.
By Mike The NYT economix blog has a post about how people view their jobs. Specifically, whether they think their job is making the world a worse place.
Speaking as a guy who’s spent years in drug advertising, which ranges from (in my opinion) occasionally useful to sometimes harmful (mostly it’s just a waste of resources that does no good but keeps me off the streets), this is a question I’ve been interested in for a while.
What’s impressive is that, while only 1% of respondents said their jobs may make the world a worse place, the rate was much higher in exactly the professions I think should die in a fire: Fast food, advertising, banking, and fashion.
It was also higher in law, which makes sense (although I think law is necessary and at least potentially can be used for good). Also among bartenders, who I like and want to keep around, although I might think differently if I had to serve overpriced drinks with stupid names to wasted Jersey Shore rejects every night.
The incredible number of fast-food workers who think their job makes the world worse–almost half–was a surprise; I guess part of that is just having such a crappy job.
When they broke down the results by industry, again, it’s exactly the industries you would expect: Tobacco, gasoline, alcohol, advertising, fast food, and legal. And jewelry and leather goods (one category), which I agree with, but it was a pleasant surprise that they agree with me.
It would be nice if this were the beginning of a national debate to the effect of: Before we decide that we “can’t afford” to take care of our old people, or to deliver mail, or to take care of our sick, maybe there are other things we can not afford first, like fast food, or tobacco, or advertising?
By Mike So Love2Learn on Reddit pointed out a silly video giving the economics of Valentine’s day. It’s a fun little piece, done in a dry deadpan that the presenter must know is hysterical.
It’s also wrong, most especially when he says that Valentine’s day spending doesn’t stimulate the economy because, after all, the money would be spent elsewhere, or it would be banked, the bank would lend it out for investment, and investment is just another form of spending.
If this were true then not only would we not worry about how the Christmas season went, but we’d actually be unhappy when it went well because all that money could have been spent on investment instead. Really, sometimes banks and big companies sit on money, or let it spin unproductively in the financial circulation where it never touches a factory or a road. And this is one of those times. So spending is good–it creates jobs, generates tax revenue, and so on.
And it’s good because all those chocolates and roses satisfy our demand for the same, right? Not so fast. Valentine’s day actually demonstrates a very different economic point: The idea—put forth most eloquently by John Kenneth Galbraith in The Affluent Society—that demand can be created by the very people that are selling us the stuff.
In other words, in many cases men don’t buy women chocolates because they feel like it, and many women didn’t just wake up this morning and think, hey, chocolates would be nice. Rather, the hype surrounding Valentine’s day has created at least part (I’d say most) of the demand for chocolate. Which is common sense–all that advertising has a purpose, after all.
That’s actually a major point: If our demand doesn’t come from our pre-existing wants, then the economy isn’t just satisfying our wants–it’s creating wants, which it then satisfies. (If it even does satisfy them; the Valentine’s hype may create more longing and misery than all the chocolate in the world can fix.)
So suddenly we lost a good part of our justification for our economic fixation on production and growth: If the purpose of the economy is to satisfy our wants, and our wants are created by hype, might we not be happier, not with more chocolate, but with less hype?
By Mike So apparently there’s yet another bad cover letter making the rounds. It’s pretty bad.
But sorry, it doesn’t beat one I have.
Some background: This isn’t some friend of a friend thing: It really came to me when I worked for a medical advertising agency. So this person was applying to be an editorial assistant at a medical ad agency, which means all the yammering about creativity would have been very very far off-base if it had been expressed in English as opposed to whatever language it’s in. Also, “current economic conditions” were the beginning of the biggest boom since LBJ left office. Finally, I redacted the person’s name, but it in no way sounded like the name of someone whose first language was not English.
Also, don’t use this as evidence that Syracuse’s Textual Studies program sucks–it also produced Fred Van Lente, writer of the inimitable Action Philosophers comix.
And without further ado, here it is: The worst cover letter ever sent (that I know of).
And the transcription:
I am writing to you in response to your newspaper advertisement for the editorial assistant’s position. If you are looking for a young and talented writer to augment your staff, search no more. You’ve reached your fountain of youth. Graduating with a B.A. in English Textual Studies from Syracuse University, has provided me with an abundance of creative thoughts and ideas, as well as the uncanny ability to bring it to life, through simple pen and paper, like an artist with his canvas.
Writing has always inspired me, an exhilirating roller coaster of a ride, traversing my mind to places and feelings refreshingly cathartic. The ability to delve deep into one’s pandora box, pulling out a rabbit of unbridled emotions and brilliance, is tantamount to my writing. It is this confidence in my abilities, combined with an insatiable drive to succeed, that ignites this author’s racecar.
In view of the current economic conditions, I have been experiencing some difficulty in finding meaningful employment in the publishing field. I have been doing some free-lance work, just completing an article for a computer magazine.
To objectively buttress my skills, I can honestly say that people who have reviewed some of my unfinished works, all are in agreement as to my raw talents. This includes college professors, head of dept(graduate school), and two editors.
I am looking for a position that will provide me, through hard work and talent, a springboard for which future success can be achieved. Please keep me in mind. You won’t be disappointed.
Thank you very much, and I look forward to speaking with you soon.
Sincerely,
[REDACTED]
By Mike So I’d never heard of John T. Harvey, but he’s got a blog over at Forbes, and it’s really really good. His February 6th post, How Economists Contributed to the Financial Crisis, shows, with admirable clarity, just what’s wrong with economics. In fact, I’m jealous–I knew the facts he mentions, but I wish I’d laid them out so clearly in my book. I’d excerpt it, but it’s better if you just go read it.
Okay, I’ll excerpt one line I really like:
This doesn’t mean that nothing useful gets done [in economics], but there are built-in incentives against it.
By Mike With all the recent attention on copyrights, it’s worth checking out this article by Nina Paley: it details how Pyrex, once a brand name for a particularly strong, heat-resistant type of glass, is now being put on all sorts of glass.
So people who see the Pyrex brand and expect the glass to stand up to some punishment are finding out that it doesn’t. Very much like if you put the Tylenol brand on rat poison. Well, sort of like that.
The article points out that the entire reason for protecting brands is that consumers know what they’re getting, and asks, reasonably, what the response would be if some other company put out ordinary glass and called it Pyrex. (Answer: the response would be swift and merciless, involving all of the coercive power of the state.)
But when the owner of the trademark does it, there’s nothing we can do.
By Mike Krugman does some fine skewering here, showing how several pundits, instead of honestly backtracking on their anti-Keynesian positions, pretend they never held them in the first place.
But it raises the question–how did we get to the point that apparently smart, nationally known pundits think they can just say whatever they want, with nobody questioning them? That is always what I think when I read Glenn Greenwald, who does an even better job of pointing out the lazy justifications of our political class (in fact, that’s practically all he ever writes about).
I don’t have an answer for that. Was it always this way, and we are only now noticing it? Did our politicians and pundits used to have more of a sense of shame? I just don’t know.
By Mike “Being poor is a mindset. And it’s one that, if given the chance, will make your ass poor again.”
From today’s Cracked.com article, “The 5 stupidest habits you develop growing up poor.”
By Mike In honor of the PIPA/SOPA boycott, our first quote of the day is from Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, in 1982:
“I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”
Yep. The VCR came out, and nobody ever went to the theater again.
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