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- Summary: Spent
Summary: Spent
[ NOTE: These book summaries are designed as captures for what I’ve read, and aren’t necessarily great standalone resources for those who have not read the book. Their purpose is to ensure that I capture what I learn from any given text, so as to avoid realizing years later that I have no idea what it was about or how I benefited from it. ]
Consumerism isn’t about buying things to make us feel better; it’s about signaling to others that we’re evolutionarily fit
Image and status were critical for most of humans’ existence, and those drives remain primary within us today
They’re key for survival and attracting mates, impressing friends, and rearing children.
We’re basically the implementation of evolution. We act out our lives as if they are own, when in fact we’re just executing evolution’s plan of having us fight each other to produce the best offspring.
The author also has a 550i
Products are broken into two main overlapping categories: those that display our desirable traits and raise our status when others see we own them, and those that bring us pleasure.
The book is about a reverse approach to learning about the world. Instead of asking men about their sexual appetites, instead ask sex workers what they’ve learned to do to make them happy.
Postmodernist cultural theory believe that culture shapes our behavior, but Darwininans argue that we inherited a rich human nature from our ancestors full of desires and preferences for seeking status and impressing others
This book traces how those status-seeking instincts get refracted through consumerist culture to create products, markets, and lifestyles that make our modern environment.
Need to tell Seth from PEL about this book if he doesn’t already know about it.
He criticizes Maslow’s hierarchy as muddled and antiquated.
All behaviors map to a Darwinian root, such as mate preference for kindness is why we seek social intimacy, belonging and acceptance. Mate preferences for status explain our need for recognition fame and glory. Preference for intelligence explain our cognitive need to learn and discovery and created, and our self actualization needs to fill our potential to get the best possible mate.
There are five key areas of human differences: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability.
Intelligence can be represent extremely well with just g.
We know how scores on these 6 things can predict behavior, habits, preferences, values, and attitudes. And how they combine to make you want to display your fitness in various ways
They’re also largely inherited and can be assessed fairly accurately by stringers in just minutes
Very little marketing training focuses on any of these things, especially since it’s taboo.
Basically we have all those great knowledge about people and how their makeup affects their behavior, but what’s being taught in schools is highly primitive and inaccurate. But they can’t update to the new stuff because it’s controversial.
It’s hard to bridge science and business because science is all about citing other people’s work to make a slightly distinctive point (iterative), where business books are all about claiming to have brand new ideas to sell books and talks.
Science hides ideas behind opaque language. Business purposely makes up new catch phrases so that EVERYONE will use them.
Science builds elaborate theories that are intimidating. Business uses bullet points and 2×2 charts that are meant to be simple and wise.
He has another book, Mating Mind, which I will be reading right after this
We are unknowing actors on the stage of evolution, and the whole thing was created by a director who didn’t stay around to see the play. It just goes on, show after show, hopefully getting better each time, with nobody to ultimately judge.
Everyone’s ideology can be viewed not as their opinions, but instead as their ad campaign for why you should go with them.
He’s asking us to rethink many of our aspirations, desires, etc. Basically asking for us to not be offended if it removes the covers off of what we are. I find that cute, but understandable. Fortunately unnecessary for me and many on this site given my views on free will
He points out that current culture has evolutionary psychology put into the bucket of dangerous conservatism. My add is that it’s labeled as a naturalistic fallacy.
But he’s saying that evolutionary psychology can criticize our current status quo better than anything before it.
Marketing is culture the same way that evolution is human nature.
Magazines are not to inform readers. They’re there to sell attention to advertisers.
Marketing isn’t just the most important thing for business. It’s the most important thing for human culture.
Marketing is best seen as a systematic attempt to fulfill human desires by producing goods and services that people will buy.
Like chivalrous lovers, marketing helps us discover desires we didn’t know we had, and helps us fulfill them in ways we never imagined
That a company should produce what people desire rather than try to convince people to purchase what they produce is a radical idea that seems obvious only in retrospect.
Most leaders in sectors like banking law, government, th police, the military, —policing, charity and science don’t think they’re in the services business. but hey are are. And they’re suffering by not using market research to improve themselves.
There’s a pothole analogy here somewhere. Postmodernism has us thinking that cultural biases and stereotypes are the pothole, and our behavior is the water. But in fact our human nature is the pothole, and the water is our behavior.
The way he described protestantism as market segment was brilliant.
The common denominator in business marketing, political democracy and religious reform is the transfer of power from the service providers to the service consumers.
Marketing is Buddha’s worst nightmare in that it perpetuates the illusion that desire leads to fulfillment.
The issue is not that marketing promotes materialism, it’s worse than, and opposite to, that. It actually promotes an narcissistic pseudo spiritualism based on subjective pleasure, status, and the way things make you feel rather than a product’s actual qualities..
That’s the point: tie to associations that make the product more than it is.
Marketing is actually anti-material. It has to be much more than just the thing, otherwise people wouldn’t spend the money.
The culmination of marketing wouldn’t be true materialism but instead a false world where you could have anything or be anything you wanted.
Need to ping Dylan and pitch this episode of PEL.
Plato was highly against this plurality of choice. He thought the masses would pick the wrong things. So he was for the philosopher king who new best.
Confucius thought the same thing. Benevolent and all powerful ruler who makes the right things happen, and protects the people from themselves.
Obamacare is in this tradition. And correctly so.
Same with fire and police. If it were optional most people wouldn’t have it and they’d be in massive danger.
Oh, and education.
Basically everything provided by government.
Marketing threatens to put infinite production ability into the service of infinite human lust, gluttony, sloth, What, greed, envy, and pride. It brings on autocracy.
Marketing is the most powerful force because it put power in the hands of the people. It’s the ability to make production work to build a playground for human passions.
He argued that powerful entities can generate memes and drive the narrative.
There are six main global media conglomerates:
Time Warner
Disney
Newscorp
Vivendi
Bertelsman
Viacom
Then there are the advertising groups:
Omnicon
WPP
Interpublic
Publicis
He’s saying that food marketing lobbyists magnify our innate desire for salt and sugar, but isn’t that exactly what the feminists are saying about gender bias? That there may be something small there that’s innate, but it gets magnified by the marketing?
Magazine ads aren’t about saying “buy this”, they’re saying if you buy this and display it you’ll make people feel as ugly as you feel right now staring at this goddess model
The most dramatic shifts in personality are emotions: if we need to appear to have lower agreeableness, given some social threat, we enter anger. If we need to appear higher in openness we enter a mode called love. This makes us seek novelty, gives us energy, gives us interest in poetry and art. When it’s no longer needed we return to our regular degree of openness. Emotions are basically short-term modifications of our big-five traits
Masculinity and femininity are also ranges of traits. Masculinity looks like low agreeableness, low conscientiousness, and high stability. Opposite for women.
Universities are actually just certificates for high IQ, so if you can do it another way, consider doing so
Openness is a proxy for being resistant to disease, because in the past groups were limited to small numbers isolated to small geographies. And you couldn’t mix with others because you could get sick and die. So having high openness is a signal that your immune system is strong.
Republicans are saying they’re frail, basically
Cutting could be showing people that they’re resistant to disease?
People have fake personalities. Acting like Adam Smith at home with division of labor, specialization, delegation, and globalization, and then they go home and pretend they like to make their own pasta.
People try to attract those who have similar traits to what they want
Trait tattoos would be interesting because you could decide who to interact with
Prereqs for buying certain products
Studies of ethnic diversity show negative effects on trust, solidarity, cohesion, cooperation, political empowerment, voting, investment in common good, etc.
Putman did the study and didn’t expect to find this, and was appalled when he did
It comes down to not having shared empathy with the other groups (me)
If everyone has different norms and values then it’s not a community, and people who aren’t in a community don’t help each other
This is why multiculturalism doesn’t work. Progressing a society requires cooperation and doing things for your neighbor. But if you dislike and distrust your neighbor, it’ll never happen.
This is why too much immigration is bad. You have to see each other as the same for society to work. And people in a multi-cultural society don’t. The Asians hate the blacks and mexicans, the mexicans hate the blacks and other latinos. On and on.
This gives a whole new view of white flight and gentrification. People want to live next to like minded people, so they make it happen regardless. Even if they’re not consciously selecting for people who look and act like themselves, that’s what ends up happening
New media and technology represents new ways to perform trait display
Expert favor consumption taxes, not income taxes, yet governments don’t listen
Consumption taxes encourage less consumption and more earning, more saving, more investing, investing, and charitable giving.
So these should be knobs that we adjust based on our needs, like credit loan rates
FairTax says 23% on retail purchases of goods or services by an individual
Fair tax or flat tax are simple options
Idea for different consumption taxes for different products
He’s basically talking about shaping the type of society we want by incentivizing the purchase and use of certain things over others, and focusing on consumption rather than income. I think it’s brilliant.
If we taxed consumption we’d have more recycling, etc.
But wouldn’t we destroy the economy if it’s based on new purchases?
Last part of the book focuses on shifting our trait-display system from conspicuous consumption to more natural, humane, efficient, accurate, responsible, and fulfilling.
He basically says we’d survive the issues with less purchasing, just as we’ve survived many things in the past. I think a better argument is that the current system is unsustainable
He argues that we should be showing off our language, intelligence, kindness, creativity, and beauty, but instead we’re relying on goods and services to be our proxies for those things.
[ Find my other book summaries here. ]
Notes
Unless the line specifically says Miessler behind it, and if the line seems decent, you can assume it’s either a direct quote or a paraphrasing of something brilliant said by the author and not me.