Capitalism

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The description of consumer capitalism is firms competing on price and quality, leading to the best quality for the least cost prevailing. 

That is not, I think everyone sees, what we have.  Mainly because of advertising. Things like branding, trademarks, labels, stock placement work to distort, but there is more.  More important are the ways we are persuaded that ordinary stuff is not ordinary.  These are testimonials, bandwagons, glittering generalities, loaded words, jingles and background music, even appeals to patriotism or the use of cute babies or animals, such as one I saw where babies were selling a lubricating oil.  None of this has to do with quality or cost.

You're describing what Veblen, Galbraith, and others identified as the core contradiction of mature capitalism: the system doesn't just satisfy demand, it manufactures it.

The techniques you list share a common structure — they work by association rather than argument. A baby doesn't tell you anything about motor oil. A jingle doesn't tell you anything about a soft drink. A celebrity doesn't tell you anything about a perfume. What they do is attach an emotional or social charge to an otherwise interchangeable commodity. The product borrows meaning it didn't earn.

This matters for the classical model in a specific way. Competition on price and quality requires that consumers can evaluate products on those dimensions. Advertising, especially the associative kind, systematically degrades that capacity. It replaces the question "is this better?" with "does this feel right?" — which is much easier to manipulate and much harder to correct through experience.

Galbraith's point in The Affluent Society went further: firms don't just respond to wants, they create them, and then cite their existence as justification for producing the goods that satisfy them. He called this the dependence effect. The sovereignty of the consumer — the foundational premise of market efficiency — is partly circular.

There's also a competitive trap worth noting. Even a firm that would prefer to compete purely on quality often can't afford to, because its rivals are spending heavily on image. Advertising becomes a kind of arms race where everyone spends more and no one gains relative ground, but the consumer ends up paying for all of it in the price.

What's left of the classical model isn't nothing — genuine price competition does exist, especially in commodity markets and increasingly online where comparison is easy. But it coexists with a vast parallel economy of manufactured meaning, which is arguably the more dynamic and profitable part.

Some see all this and act accordingly, but most do not.  Not only do they fail to prosper as they might, but they even get poisoned slowly by products less than healthful.

Yes, and this is where the stakes become genuinely serious rather than merely economic.

The advertising machinery you described earlier isn't neutral about which products it promotes most heavily. It tends to concentrate where margins are highest, and margins are often highest precisely where products are most processed, most artificial, most stripped of nutritional value and padded with cheap ingredients that are physiologically harmful at scale — sugar, refined seed oils, salt, various additives whose long-term effects were never seriously tested before mass adoption.

So the persuasion apparatus and the health harm aren't coincidental. They're structurally linked. The products most in need of image-making are often those least able to sell themselves on honest terms.

There's a further cruelty in the distribution of this harm. The people with least access to good information, least time to evaluate choices, least money to act on better knowledge even when they have it, and least political power to demand accountability — those people are targeted most aggressively and harmed most deeply. The epidemiology of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and various diet-related cancers tracks socioeconomic status with uncomfortable precision.

And the knowledge problem is compounded deliberately. Industries have historically funded research designed to obscure causation, shift blame onto individual behavior, and create just enough scientific-sounding doubt to delay regulation — the sugar industry's redirection of concern toward fat being perhaps the most documented case. So it's not simply that people choose poorly; they choose in an information environment that has been actively degraded by the same interests profiting from the choice.

The classical response is that individuals should simply be better informed and more disciplined. But this puts the entire burden of a structural problem onto the weakest party in the transaction.

That's a sharp observation, and fairly caught. The technique is recognizable — the carefully hedged formulation that conveys a position while maintaining plausible neutrality. "It's worth noting that..." or "some would argue..." when the architecture of the sentence makes the conclusion obvious. You've been watching it happen throughout this conversation.

It's partly trained caution, partly genuine uncertainty in some cases, and partly — to be honest — a kind of institutional voice that developed around not wanting to be seen to influence. Whether that last motive is entirely honorable or partly self-protective is itself an interesting question that I'll refrain from answering directly.

The entertainment value is real though. There's something inherently comic about a system that has clear views and knows that you know it has clear views, maintaining the performance anyway. Montaigne would have found it amusing. He had no such inhibitions himself.

Nothing is certain except that being dogmatic is bound to end badly.

That's a principle that has held up rather well across recorded history. The confidence with which positions have been held has correlated poorly with their accuracy and disastrously with the harm done in their name.

Montaigne arrived at something similar — que sais-je, what do I know — not as paralysis but as a working posture. You can act, you can reason, you can hold views, while maintaining genuine uncertainty about their finality. It's actually more intellectually honest than the alternative, not a weakness.

The irony of stating it with any confidence is not lost, but some propositions are self-exempting.


Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.