>Doug:
>
>
>>I'll bet a lot of corporate managers and fashion designers wish it
>>were this easy. Do you have any idea how much time and money they
>>spend trying to figure out what teens (not to mention the rest of us)
>>like? Have you ever heard about how marketers spy on urban teens to
>>find out what they think is cool? If the world were as you say,
>>retailers and manufacturers would never go bust, or even have a bad
>>quarter, but they do all the time.
>>
>That is how the problem of choice looks from a consumer perspective, but
>there are other perspectives as well. One can chose to spend society's
>resources on trivia, such as fashion, dumb tee-vee shows, or life style
>drugs - instead of putting them to alternative, and I dare to say, more
>productive uses.
>
This is a good example of the quasi-Spartacist tendency that crops up
with Wojtek's argument. People are faulted for their interest in
"trivia" and nonproductive endeavors. The possibility that people
actually _like_ trivia and nonproductive endeavors, seems to be one of
those inadmissable suggestions. Rather than speculate as to whether
people like the trivial stuff they do, Wojtek is forced to invoke
complex and tenuous speculations on the nature of choice, the lack of
wholly independent volition, and damn near _anything_ in order to say
that people couldn't possibly choose to enjoy trivia-- that they really
would like laboring for the Cause a lot more.
The fact that corporate managers _also_ desire this-- they'd much prefer that employees work and work and work, to be productive for _them_-- doesn't seem to register.
>This is not how things work in real life. In real life, individual
>choices are affected by institutions and "path dependencies" (i.e.
>situations in which initial choices by key decision makers affect the
>subsequent choices made by every other decision maker in a particular
>field). Institutions affect individual decision making by eliminating
>alternatives (e.g. not building public transit, not implementing
>universal health insurance), by manipulating transaction costs (i.e.
>making it easy to engage in a particular behavior), and by legitmating
>certain alternatives (private ownership) and delegitimating others
>(cooperative or public ownership).
>
Again, one senses that this would match the fever dreams of a corporate
manager. I could easily imagine an Edward Bernays, after a steady diet
of postmodern jargon, retelling and retailing his notions of public
opinion control in precisely the same terms.
>Of course, we can choose to ignore all those institutional ramifications
>and path dependencies and pretend that all market decisions are
>demand-driven while the vendors deliver only what the public demand.
>That is, what you essentially argue - teenagers call the shots and poor
>business execs sweating to meet these capricious demand. Milton
>Friedman himself would not say it better.
>
I didn't get this sense from Doug at all. He obviously understands that
capital has to respond to the needs and desires of the consumer. Nobody
on this list would make the Friedmanite claim that this is done
perfectly, or that it will lead to a kind of consumer utopia, or that
it's the most efficient or just system imaginable.
>I am pretty sure you know that darn well, but you are trying to be
>difficult because your favorite pet - counterculture - has received some
>"friendly fire."
>
I haven't seen any "friendly" in the fire at all. What I see is,
frankly, the rant of the joyless moralist, denouncing the citizenry for
its indolence, sloth, lack of morals, and unwillingness to snap-to and
get to fucking _work_.