Hell, if I had the money, I’d fly first class.

Well, I think it was Mandelstam who wrote a poem, in the stalinist years, that begins something like ‘raise a glass of champagne…’ just to provoke the pissants. I believe it might be time to raise a glass of champagne to the limousine liberals, to the Keynes-es that make buckets of money on Wall Street and have sense enough to call for national health care plans, to the wealthy who aren’t greedy, resentful pigs, nor furthering the ideology of greedy, resentful pigs – to the ones skiing in Gstaad who are calling for employment policies that don’t lead to mass layoffs to make CEO stock options more valuable, to the Kennedys, the Bernsteins, the Soroses, to all the ones who are too fucking haughty to endorse slimy warmongering schemes to cream money off the taxpayer using national security as a mask. God bless them every one.

He was also a very tall man. Economy class would have been crippling.

A physicist, a chemist & an economist are stranded on a desert island. A can of food washes up. The three discuss methods of opening the can:
the physicist says that if we drop the can from the top of the palm tree onto the rock, the can will puncture but not spill the contents;
the chemist says that if the can is heated to a specific temperature, the lid can be removed;
the economist says ‘assume a can-opener’. . . .

With respect to advertising, Galbraith claimed that advertising creates demand for unnecessary products: given that humans do not require caffeinated sugar-water, alcoholic beverages, or portable music players, etc., Galbraith’s contention seems unassailable.

Galbraith probably had to fly first-class due to his height.

In fact, as the example of Ryanair etc show us, the normal concept of first class air travel probably wouldn’t exist in a genuinely free airlines market (a genuinely free market in airlines is, as far as I am aware, an experiment that has not been attempted anywhere in the world ever).

Ah, the free market . . . .

This is ultimately ideological. It is not a “proof” in any sense as the NY Times ignorantly claimed in its embarrassingly shameful and error-filled obit. I would note that while these things are hard to prove empirically one way or the other, the current trend is to view tastes and preferences as very malleable and unstable, subject to context and all kinds of things. This is coming out of behavioral and experimental economics.

The traditional split between “informative” advertising and not is that supposedly the former moves one along a demand curve, it “informs” about prices, especially about sales when prices are especially low. Non-informative, or manipulative, supposedly moves peoples’ demand curves, either by changing their preferences, or by “informing” people that their product will fit in somehow with their preferences, satisfying an image or life style they seek to achieve or exhibit to get social approval and maybe even to get laid.

It’s not like television is a basic human need or anything

I think revealed preference would suggest otherwise; plenty of villages in India or Africa where you can see satellite dishes but no nearby wells (without even getting into the plasma-screen TVs beloved of welfare policy debates).

Also, does Becker or Galbraith’s theory fit corporate behaviour better? Companies do plan product cycles; they do plan advertising “campaigns” and they do it for a reason, that being because it works. You can make stable and independent preferences do the job of a sensible theory of advertising in the same way that you can make a butterknife do the job of a Phillips screwdriver, but that doesn’t mean that a butterknife is the best (because simplest) tool for the job, or that Phillips screws were designed by people who were thinking about butterknives.

What a damning indictment of one person’s graduate program.

Having like Daniel spent far more time around advertising types than is probably rational, I do find some of the arguments about advertising here a little odd. Many forms of advertising are explicitly created to increase demand for a certain class of product. A lot of money has been spent on research over the last 40 years to find out how to do this effectively.

One of the most obvious ways you increase demand is by associating a product with a certain lifestyle/class/aspiration in the viewers mind.

A different kind of advertising seeks to reinforce/strengthen demand. People Like Us advertising.

And some advertising tells you that ASDA is cheaper, or they have good quality products. Which may even be true (does anyone ever check?).