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Yet another weird SF fan
 

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

If Smart Money Buys Brand X …

If smart money buys Brand X, there are two potential conclusions:

  • If this is a challenge to capitalist economics, we must save people from themselves by forbidding them from shopping at Whole Foods.
  • Only people shopping at Walmart should be allowed to vote.
I also noticed some absurd reactions in the comments to the article. For example:
This story goes against all of the Friedmanite and Austrian economic ideology which presumes that consumers will always make the most informed choices and markets operate with perfect information.
No. We merely assume that consumers are better informed than politicians.

Another absurd comment:

So "national branding", it turns out, is, more or less, another scam essentially, to fleece those who are least able to discern value. The only (cheap) solace here is that many of them must be Tea Partiers, but alas, more of them struggling working poor.
According to stereotype, Tea Partiers are more likely to shop at Walmart whereas liberals are more likely to shop at Whole Foods. As I have said before, it's the left-wing businesses that are spherical trusts.

3 Comments:

Anonymous TJIC said...

I chased the "spherical trust" link back to Amazon, and - heck - I even read those books 30 years ago.

...but I don't remember the reference.

So, what's a spherical trust?

9:33 AM  
Blogger Joseph said...

IIRC, spherical trusts were based on appealing to irrational impulses in which buying one useless item lead to buying other useless items in a way that reinforced buying yet other useless items... For example, shopping at Whole Foods and then having a snack at Starbucks while reading The New York Times.

11:26 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I thought spherical trusts were trusts any way you look at them?

Stupid physics joke aside: As one commenter pointed out, the conclusion doesn't follow from the correlation. The uninformed may be buying name brands because the uninformed are also poor and socially backwards, and they are trying to buy respectability by buying what they assume the rich are buying.

11:32 AM  

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