Skip Navigation

Someone should tell China they are doing it all wrong.

218

You're viewing part of a thread.

Show Context
218 comments
  • I think the 'objective' methodology for figuring that out would be either a marketing study, ethnography or something else. My rule of thumb is to see where the majority of advertising money is going. The rich and elite are usually more susceptible to advertising schemes because they have the ability to replicate the lives that marketing portrays. That is the beauty of owning massive amounts of private capital, while it is selling an unattainable material lie to us proles, it is only selling an unattainable spiritual lie (that if you are unhappy despite money and success, consumption will solve that unhappiness) to the wealthy and elite. They can actually attain the material reality portrayed in advertising, so it is just a matter of getting their eyeballs on it.

    Also, within capitalism, isolation is usually the rule of thumb. The elite of capitalism wish to stand apart from the mass of humanity, as titans and utilitarian betters.

    • Yeah that makes sense. Would you say that rich/elite can be more susceptible due to their lack of like 'risk'? Which is just another way of describing material their wealth/resources?


      Sorry for the wall of text, I'm just a bit curious about your thoughts.

      I'm thinking to calculate susceptibility in a superficial way, for like success of marketing of the kind you mentioned; you get a person's susceptibility by using their 1. temperament (individual/group/cultural differences), 2. their perceived material resources say abstracted with dollars, 3. their actual material resources again with dollars for convenience, 4. randomness/pseudo-randomness to account for uh whatever stuff we don't know (if economists and population geneticists and sociologists can use it I will too!!)

      There'd be another set of variables/factors based on like how much money was poured into a marketing campaign, relevance maybe, etc.


      What I wanted to ask you actually, was, do you think that given this back-of-the-napkin model, would 2. be like, more often than not, the determining factor? Like would the perceived or actual resource of in terms of fiat money (so like an abstraction which can be adjusted when needed...) be more 'significant'? Where significance is like a relative weighting of the two terms...

      What really gets me is the "It's a banana, how much could it cost?" and like recently when the Brtsh PM tried to buy stuff from a grocery checkout; the level of disconnect is just so much more that I think I could have imagined. If you gave a prize to like how out of touch, they are, I'm sure I'd be completely off the mark. So I'm trying to bridge that gap in understanding

      Yeah, what do you think?

      • I honestly think that the significance difference would be related more to the individual temperament than the perceived v.s. actual material value. The problem is that both of those things influence each other, so the randomness.

        The statement (in words) would be like this, the weighted significance between perceived v.s. actual material value is a variable that is tied towards the individual's temperament, up to a point where actual material value reaches some arbitrary threshold of say 100 million dollars, where it then becomes negligible, but then it is entirely a factor of the individual's temperament. However, I also believe that one's temperament is also affected as a variable of one's actual wealth, however this is then a classic nature v.s. nurture problem, and while we can get it into set theory, we cannot solve which comes first, we just have to start taking data and testing our weighted categories against actual material results.

You've viewed 218 comments.