Examining Capitalist Ethos

Apparently if it doesn't have a statistical significance of 1, it's not predictable enough for him.

I am aware, yet the behavior they can control is localized and not sufficient to truly dominate the behavior and choices of people. Our knowledge right now is sufficient. That is about it.

Just because you can make people believe that Mercedes is the classiest most luxurious car you can buy it does not mean everyone forever will strive to have a Mercedes.

Companies spend way too much on marketing lately, it is a tendency, but it is not something that has allowed a monopoly anywhere specially not in a capitalist market.

This feels like it's besides the point. And "lately" as opposed to when?

Marketing has existed for a long while but not so many resources have been dedicated to it as in modern times.

There is a church in England where there is a Bellmaker making his bells. Medieval advertising. Venice. Marco Polo. The India Trading Companies. Sure, history has its share of advertising but from there to doing and researching what companies do nowadays? (Do you know, for example, why most of the channel icons are on the lower right of your TV screen?)

The money spent on it? 2.9$ billion in 2010 for Coca Cola.

With the onset of globalization this is when marketing becomes relevant, when companies try to stake their name in foreign land and find they already have other preferences so they had to instill their selves as one. And prominent as a figure of worldwide notice.

But buying behavior of a single product, while it can be manipulated to an extent, is still not something that has feasibly allowed economists to predict how economy i going to move.

Very interesting topic! I just started reading Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber's main point so far seems to be that the "capitalist spirit", as in, the kind of mentality that's necessary for modern industrial capitalism to function, isn't simply greed – for capitalism, you need people who see their job, their "calling", as an end in itself.

I'll have to read more of the book first, though.

Keynes was able to create models that accurately predicted macroeconomic behavior way back in the 30s, and they've been stunningly successful since then as new economists have picked them up and refined them. All these claims that we can't accurately model aggregate human behavior because humans are unpredictable, blah blah, ignore the fact that we have already done so.

The challenge, of course, is getting leaders who understand and are willing to employ these models. Krugman has a slightly wonkish blog post today that discusses this phenomenon: people calling for "newer, better models" on the basis that the ones we have aren't working, ignoring the blatant truth that a large body of economists have been predicting with an extraordinarily high success rate for nearly a century.

edited 15th Apr '15 9:58:50 AM by Fighteer

While I sympathize with anyone who would use an image from Thomas Dolby's classic, the fact remains that because a few people have managed to predict it, then it behooves to ask the question "What have they done with it?"

I understand political reasons and whatnot can keep a system away from use, no matter how much better it is (Hundreds, possibly thousands of examples of everything for this). I am just saying that macroeconomic behavior does not dictate general human behavior, nor can it predict other things of a possibly greater scale, nor that it is that close to infallible. (Acceptables Cronbach's Alphas are generally 0.6+, but even then the results of anything with that speak of "tendencies" and "possibilities" instead of "certainties" because of the statistical handling of a "margin of error")

For example the Iraq War, the Arab Spring, Chavez' rise to power, or other things are unpredictable yet their impact on economy can be, indeed, huge.

As I said many times before, the variables are way too many for knowing that people are going to buy will end up affecting the economy.

Not really; there's several pretty good predictors for revolutions, which are even better in aggregate. For instance, the year female population reaches 50% literacy is usually very close to the one where a wild revolutions occurs.

I have yet to hear about the bloody attempts to overthrow the governments in many of these nations

Most of those have already had theirs and/or an independence war. Furthermore, I said "wild", not bloody. Chances are, you never even heard of, say, Jamaica's struggle for independence.

edited 15th Apr '15 7:54:36 AM by TheHandle

Dan Price, the CEO of credit card company Gravity Payments, cut his salary $930,000 to give minimum wage workers a raise to $70,000/year.

He's actually using the company's profits to finance the pay raises. I wonder how this will affect next year's bottom line...