Source pages: In This Economy?, Quotes batch 22
Quote pages: Scanlon – In This Economy
“the number of Americans that support ‘spending on the poor’ is 71%, but if you call it ‘welfare’ that number drops to 30%… There is no difference beyond that of words! Yet that makes all the difference.”
The mechanics of political-manipulation applied to economic policy: label the same thing differently to trigger different associations and produce different polling numbers.
Fascism as marketing
“Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power… It changes citizens into taxpayers—so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers—so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own.”
Scanlon draws here on Toni Morrison. The diagnosis: fascism operates by reframing the categories — turning solidarity into a cost and identity into a brand. The economic and political manipulation are inseparable. See political-manipulation.
Quotes
Concept
“The ‘Economy’ is a concept we use to talk about the aggregate of human desires, but we treat it as if it were a weather system.” (p. 12)
Behavior
“Consumer behavior is driven more by the ‘fear of missing out’ than by any rational calculation of utility.” (p. 56)
Game Theory
“Labor negotiations are a game where the side that can afford to wait the longest usually dictates the terms.” (p. 134)
Cognition
“Inflation is as much a cognitive phenomenon as a monetary one; it happens because people believe it is happening.” (p. 182)
Memory
“Our economic policies are often just reactions to the memory of the last recession, regardless of the current data.” (p. 210)
Related pages
- systems-thinking
- narrative-bias
- political-manipulation
- cooperation-game-theory
- dual-process-cognition
- happiness-vs-meaning
- economic-behavior
- thaler-misbehaving