Marketing and rioting

These are some recommendations from the newly published report on the 2011 riots in England, with my comments.

"Better information should be provided to parents and schools about marketing techniques and the way they seek to influence behaviour. The Panel recommends that the Advertising Standards Authority make the impact of advertising and branding techniques on young people a feature of its new school education programme to raise resilience amongst children."

So the ASA should go into schools to educate young people how not to be [unduly] influenced by  marketing trechniques.

"Communities are concerned about the aggressive marketing by brands to young people, who often cannot afford their products. The Panel recommends that the Advertising Standards Authority incorporate commercialism and materialism into their engagement work with young people and take action on the findings."

Right - so marketing to people who can't afford to buy a product is going to entice them into stealing it instead, so the ASA  needs to step in and tell them about commercialsm and materialism, which are the very lifeblood of advertising/marketing.

"Children must be protected from excessive marketing, whilst supporting business and not harming commerce. We also recommend that the Government appoint an independent champion to manage a dialogue between Government and big Brands to further this debate"

What, they should market things just to make children buy them if they can afford them, but not enough to make them steal them? Rather than there not being excessive marketing, we should protect children from it?

Are the report writers blinkered as to what marketing/advertising is? It is a deliberate attempt to get people to buy things by getting them to want them and/or believe they need them. There's an almighty paradox if we accept advertising/marketing, but also educate children in how not to succumb to it. It's analagous to teaching them how to get hit less painfully instead of stopping the hitting. Marketing and advertising are not natural forces like the weather. They're something we deliberately do

In the current system, if the effects of marketing are mitigated, the amount of the product consumed will fall and this will lead to less work making it and so less ability by workers to consume products. It's called cyclic consumption and it's a massive problem. We have to keep consuming to keep economic growth going, but we can't keep consuming stuff as we haven't got an infinite amount of it. The answer is to abandon the riduculous concept of economic growth as we know it and start working on meeting human needs sustainably.

What is wrong with the idea of making the meeting of human needs, especially basic ones, our priority as a planet of humans? Obviously we have to do so using only the finite resources available to us. Therefor it seems logical to conserve those resources so that we can support the maximumm population that is scientifically possible. That's a Resouce Based Economy in a nutshell.

There's a basic human need for protection from the elements/environment, and clothes and shoes are likely to be a way to provide this need, I touched before (http://colins-rbe.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/irreducible-human-need.html) on Amartya Sen's Capability Approach. When advertisers make people crave the latest pair of trainers, they are not trying to appeal to their need to protect their feet and skeleton from the effects of walking and running,  but to higher order needs for feelings of self-worth, acceptance, etc, and suggesting that buying a product or products will help meet that need. But it won't.

Home of the future

I have been catching up with the TV series 'Home of the Future' on 4OD (Channel 4). It is extremely interesting and informative, but I wanted to blog about a couple of ideas that stuck out for those sensitive to the RBE concept.

The family featured in the futurized home run a garage and one project was to upgrade it to deal with electric cars, but this was presented as a way of keeping the garage in business. This was just one way in which the programme series has shown up its preconception that there will be / ought to be paid work in the future (it's a given), even though it shows ways of saving work in the home. One family member who works at the garage opined that their future will involved repairing electric cars. Repairing things is good, but to create work and keep comsumption going, products are currently made so that they need repairing or replacing. In an RBE, transport hardware will be designed and built to optimally provide the service of transport as a way of helping human needs to be met. It will not be designed to keep people in work, or to consume resources unecessarily.

The second idea was a smartphone app that helps you find out where the cheapest supermarket prices are. Setting aside the absence of the need for money in an RBE, we can still see the absurdity of using the processing power of a smartphone to mine for price data that is essentially already available, but kept separate for the purposes of competition. The bewildering price structures in supermarkets make it necessary either to have this secondary tech to help you, to use considerable brain power to achieve the same end, or simply to ignore the "shopping around" element altogether.

A supermarket has to create enough of an impression that is the 'cheapest' to get you to choose it over the others, but also to get you to spend more money there once you have chosen it. One of the tenets of the free market is supposed to be clear price information with no subsidies or lags and no externalities. The supermarket price wars give a complete lie to this.

Killing gadgets

I like gadgets and programmes about gadgets, but this week's Gadget Show on Channel 5 featured remote controlled weapons. Ok this was only for paint balling, but just because the payload is a paint ball it doesn't mean the technology isn't based on real weaponry. In fact the presenter already pointed out how much money is invested in developing remote control killing machines.

Yes, the finest technology, and the finest minds are being put towards killing members of our own species. We are fighting over scarces resources, but we are wasting resources doing the fighting, thereby creating (or increasing at least) the reason to fight by the actual fighting itself.

And let's not forget that this is all good, because it's making work for people to do -and we must have more work, so that we can earn the money to get the resources that we've decided we must pay for with money because we've made them scarce so that people have to pay for them or because we've wasted them on fighting, or making things that don't last because we have to sell more of them to get more money to buy more of them.


 Lunacy.

Christmas appeal for cyclic consumption

In today's Evening Standard (London), some pundit was arguing for the VAT increase (due in the New Year) to be postponed to help retailers sell more stuff. He also wants to have a traffic free period as more stuff gets sold then. (Interesting - retailers usually argue for less restriction on cars).

Of course if the VAT increase is postponed, the government could lose tax revenue, but this could be offset by people buying more stuff. Deep sigh. What is it that we in fact need? Basics - food, shelter, clean water, medical care, a source of information and communication; and possibly some things to give us a quality life, rather than an existence - the means to express ourselves or to enjoy seeing others express themselves, let's say. I do  not suggest this is a comprehensive list. But buying more stuff to keep people in work making more stuff for us to buy - cyclic consumption - is just silly.

What is a valid contribution to society?

In the current system, the distinction seems largely to be whether you are in paid work or not. Although some paid work is taboo - drug dealing, say,  pretty much any paid work is seen as contributing to society - even selling cigarettes / tobacco.

This is a bit of an exaggeration, as there are people of course who give of their time voluntarily and do things that are socially necessary and/or socially constructive. These will tend to be people who have the money and therefore the time to do something socially constructive without being paid specifically for doing so. Even as I write, I see the true logic of how society should be operated arising from what I am writing, even though I'm not writing exactly what I originally intended.

No-one should be doing anything that is not socially constructive. We put people in prison for some socially destructive things, but for others we pay them a salary. Lunacy. Let's go back to the volunteers. They're doing something socially constructive, because it is socially constructive and for no other reason. Does it not seem likely that the vast majority of people, freed from waged slavery, would do the same?

Under the current system, consuming is contributing to society, because of cyclic consumption:  I have to work to get money to spend to keep you in work so that you can consume and keep the next person in work, and so on. Lest we should see the foolishness of all this, advertising/marketing steps in to keep us thinking we must consume more. What is this system (or those that operate it) trying to achieve? Are they genuinely trying to use up resources as quickly as possible? Do they just not care that the system is consuming the resources ever more rapidly?

Efficiency and employment are opposing each other

"In some parts of the country ... the public sector accounts for a third of the workforce. An urgent rebalancing was vital", wrote Damian Reece in The Daily Telegraph.

How much of the workforce should be in the public sector, then? We have to start from the premise that the public sector is a Bad Thing, which Reece only hints at by suggesting imbalance between the private and public sectors (presumably).

Here's the point. The only work that should be done is work that is directly relevant to social progress. Having a job to get money does not count as 'relevant to social progress', unless the work being done is in itself relevant to social progress. The work that needs to be done should be done in the most efficient way possible relative to the actual (ie not money) resources available. In many cases this means machines. Humans should only be doing socially relevant work that cannot be done by machines.

People in he public and private sectors all want/need to keep their jobs and there's a tendency to not be as efficient as possible in order that people may stay in work. The public sector gets criticised for that because it's tax funded and most people have no choice but to pay taxes, whereas in the private sector you allegedly have choice. This is a false dichotommy. The obvious essential service that the private sector predominates is food production and distribution. But food isn't produced and distributed as efficiently as possible, because people would lose their jobs - so it's the same thing as the public sector being inefficient to save jobs.

Until we decouple the need for access to the necessities of life from work and money, we are always going to have this problem. If we were so efficient that few if any people had jobs and therefore money to buy the efficiently produced goods/services, they would have to be given away. In our current system we create a cycle of consumption whereby jobs are made for people so that they can get money to buy the goods that are made for the large part to keep people in work.