Ep 34: Economic Propaganda

Recently I've been thinking about how certain countries went from totally impoverished to "developed" in the last 80 years. In particular, Japan, Singapore, China and, more recently, Malaysia, come to mind. 60 years ago China had nothing. Its infrastructure was ravaged by wars, it's agriculture was pretty messed up from the various great leaps forward, and because it was communist it wasn't getting a ton of aid. Yet today china has laid the most high speed rail line on the planet. They have hundreds of subway systems. Now they're building infrastructure for other countries. Japan has a similar story, though it started a bit earlier and had more help from the US in the form of trade and loans. How did this happen? It seems like in both cases, marketing played a huge role. Marketing is the fuel that drives a population to work, even when that work makes their life harder, not easier. Let's say you're a government and you want to build a road, but you have no money. Some governments have tried to solve this by putting out propoganda appealing to patriotism, or family duty. You talk about how awesome things will be with that new road. But historically that hasn't worked so well. The stuff that seems to work better is economic propaganda: Ads. You convince people that their life would be way more awesome if they had a handbag, or a vacuum. However, they need to build a couple roads before they'll have enough money to buy it. You convince people to trade work on a permanent thing for the chance to purchase a totally impermanent one. China's always been a hostile economic environment for foreign companies, with the exception of luxury goods. However, if you're a European maker of handbags, you've been welcome for a long time. Us basically did this same thing. "Keeping up with the joneses" and all that. We needed people to want that middle class life, so they would do crappy jobs that were needed for the country's development. However, were're now starting to see the dark side of this strategy. Marketing makes us want more, and when there's work to be done, we work more, which is good. However, when there isn't enough work marketing just makes us feel bad. It makes us feel like we're lacking because we can't buy the things being marketed while others can. Marketing is a force for action, and when that action can't be used productively, to create, it instead becomes a force for destruction. When you pump marketing into country that has a lot of stuff to get done, you get roads, etc. When you pump marketing into a country with high unemployment, you get a lot of crime instead. So, as technology accelerates job loss, will marketing respond? Will we paint a picture of a life that is unrealistic for most people? What will happen when 90% of people can't have the life they see on TV? Will the strategy we used to bootstrap our countries lead their demise? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gaynor.substack.com