Stupid market forces
I was reading Steve Pavlina’s blog today, and ran across a sentence that I had to stop and read again:
There are a lot more dummies than smart people in the world, and those dummies have credit cards.
It was an angle that hadn’t quite occurred to me before. And I thought, “Oh my God. This explains so much about our culture.”
Because in our modern capitalist marketplace, stupidity is overrepresented. Stupid people (including me, for most of my life) have credit cards and no self-control, and they buy everything that claims to be quick and easy, whether they have the money for it or not. Smart people, on the other hand, really have money, but they don’t spend as much money as the broke stupid people, because they’re smart.
That’s why all the media panders to the lowest common denominator. It’s not because everyone is stupid. It’s because the stupid people spend loads more money than the smart people, because they’re stupid. So stupid people are far and away the more powerful market force.
Scary, isn’t it?
March 14th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
It gets worse when you consider that stupid people are also registered to vote.
March 15th, 2006 at 5:45 am
Too true… but it gets worse than that, because stupid people are overrepresented in the polls — because they spend so much money on companies that employ lobbyists, and that want more of the stupid people’s money. Vicious circle, and the smart people lose…
March 20th, 2006 at 5:00 am
Stupidity tends to increase with a larger sample of the population. Any intelligent behavior gets washed out with all the people who aren’t thinking!
March 27th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.
-Albert Einstein