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The Power of Advertising

Where would modern society be without advertising? Individual advertisers might think they are just trying to sell a particular product but advertising as a whole sells us an entire lifestyle. If it weren't for advertising the whole of society would be quite different. The economy, for instance, would be plunged into a crisis without the adverts and all the publicity that fuel our desire for limitless consumption.

As John Berger observed in his book "Ways of Seeing", all advertising conveys the same simple message: my life will be richer, more fulfilling once I make the next crucial purchase. Adverts persuade us with their images of others who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The purpose is to make me marginally dissatisfied with my life - not with the life of society, just with my individual life. I am supposed to imagine myself transformed after the purchase into an object of envy for others - an envy which will then give me back my love of myself.

The prevalence of this social envy is a necessary condition if advertising is to have any hold on us whatsoever. Only if we have got into the habit of comparing ourselves with others and finding ourselves lacking, will we fall prey to the power of advertising.

While fanning the flames of our envy advertising keeps us preoccupied with ourselves, our houses, our cars, our holidays and the endless line of new electronic gadgets that suddenly seem indispensable. Tensions in society and problems in the rest of the world, if attended to at all, quickly fade into the background. They are certainly nothing to get particularly worked up about. After all, there can't be any winners without losers. That's life.

Furthermore, together with the holy rituals of shopping (people get dressed up now to go shopping in the way that they only used to get dressed up when they went to church) advertising is one of the ways in which we are quietly persuaded that our society is the best of all possible worlds (or at least so good that it is not worth campaigning for any fundamental changes). Adverts implicitly tell us to get off our fat arses and do some shopping, and the idea that the shelves of the shops are full of the latest products is indeed one of the most effective ways in which contemporary society gets its legitimation.

People like John Berger are also not entirely over the moon about the impact that advertising and shopping have on the value of political freedom. Freedom is supposed to be the highest value in our societies, but in the age of the consumer that freedom is all too readily identified with the freedom to choose between Pepsi and Coke, McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken, Toyota and Ford, and people lose interest in the various political freedoms and our ability to participate in the process of exercising democratic control. There are lots of criticisms that could be made of modern democracies, but no one is going to pay much attention to them if they are more interested in becoming happy shoppers.



In all these ways advertising helps to keep the whole socio-economic show on the road. We are rarely aware of this because we are too busy working to earn the money to pay for the objects of our dreams - dreams that play on the screen of our mind like the little clips of film we see in the commercial breaks.

 

 

Employment

Since individuals typically earn their incomes from working for companies whose requirements are constantly changing, it is quite possible that at any given time not all members of a country's potential work force will be able to find an employer that needs their labor. This would be less problematic in an economy in which such individuals had unlimited access to resources such as land in order to provide for themselves, but when the ownership of the bulk of its productive capacity resides in relatively few hands, most individuals will be dependent on employment for their economic well-being. It is typical for true capitalist economies to have rates of unemployment that fluctuate between 3% and 15%. Some economists have used the term "natural rate of unemployment" to describe this phenomenon.

Depressed or stagnant economies have been known to reach unemployment rates as high as 30%, while events such as military mobilization (a good example is that of World War II) have resulted in just 1-2% unemployment, a level that is often termed "full employment". Typical unemployment rates in Western economies range between 5% and 10%. Some economists consider that a certain level of unemployment is necessary for the proper functioning of capitalist economies. Equally, some politicians have claimed that the "natural rate of unemployment" highlights the inefficiency of a capitalist economy, since not all its resources – in this case human labor – are being allocated efficiently.

Some libertarian economists argue that higher unemployment rates are in part the result of minimum wage laws, as well as in part the result of misguided monetary policy, and are not inevitable in a capitalist economy. They also claim that if the value of the productive capacity of a given employee is worth less to the employer than the minimum wage, that person will become unemployed, and therefore unemployment will exist whenever the legal minimum wage exceeds the true economic value of the least productive members of the labor pool. Likewise, if the amount of money a person can obtain on welfare approaches or equals what they could make by working, that person's incentive to work will be reduced.

Some unemployment is voluntary, such as when a potential job is turned down because the unemployed person is seeking a better job, is voluntarily living on savings, or has a non-wage-earning role, such as in the case of a traditional homemaker. Some measures of employment disregard these categories of unemployment, counting only people who are actively seeking work and have been unable to find any.

 

Origins of money

There are numerous myths about the origins of money. The concept of money is often confused with coinage. Coins are a relatively modern form of money. Their first appearance was probably in Asia in the 7th century BC. And whether these coins were used as money in the modern sense has also been questioned.

To determine the earliest use of money, we need to define what we mean by money. We will return to this issue shortly. But with any reasonable definition the first use of money is as old as human civilization. The early Persians deposited their grain in state or church granaries. The receipts of deposit were then used as methods of payment in the economies.

Thus, banks were invented before coins. Ancient Egypt had a similar system, but instead of receipts they used orders of withdrawal – thus making their system very close to that of modern checks. In fact, during Alexander the Great’s period, the granaries were linked together, making checks in the 3rd century BC more convenient than British checks in the 1980s.

However, money is older than written history. Recent anthropological and linguistic research indicates that not only is money very old, but it’s origin has little to do with trading, thus contradicting another common myth. Rather, money was first used in a social setting. Probably at first as a method of punishment.

Early Stone Age man began the use of precious metals as money. Until the invention of coins, metals were weighed to determine their value. Counting is of course more practical, the first standardized ingots appeared around 2200 BC. Other commonplace objects were subsequently used in the abstract sense, for example miniature axes, nails, swords, etc.

Full standardization arrived with coins, approximately 700 BC. The first printed money appeared in China, around 800 AD. The first severe inflation was in the 11th century AD. The Mongols adapted the bank note system in the 13th century, which Marco Polo wrote about. The Mongol bank notes were “legal tender”, i.e. it was a capital offense to refuse them as payment. By the late 1400s, centuries of inflation eliminated printed bank notes in China. They were reinvented in Europe in the 17th century.

 

 


Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1404


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