When I was in college studying Economics, one of the first things we learned is the idea that each individual is a rational decision-maker with perfect information and therefore pursues a transaction that completely improves his position, and the entire field of Economics is predicated on this assumption. It’s no surprise that when psychologists come along and argue that this is simply not true, the economists would throw the biggest of academic hissy fits. This touches upon one of the most fundamental problems with both Economics and Psychology. We are taught that these are the ‘social sciences’ and their researchers are scientists. What we are not taught or reminded about is that science is about predicting an outcome by controlling inputs. The social sciences have yet to predict anything except the obvious destructive predictions like dropping an atomic bomb on Miami would reduce Miami’s productive capacities in the short-term. In fact, there’s a crisis in the ‘social sciences’ of failing to reproduce their experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
If you think about it, nobody should really be surprised that non-scientists aren’t doing scientific work. What’s surprising is that so many people have fallen for their scam. The scam goes something like this. If you quack like a duck, glue feathers on to yourself, and wear a plastic duck bill, people might assume you’re a duck. What the social ‘scientists’ have done is act like real scientists in every way except the most important parts, predicting things and creating experiments you can reproduce to confirm the predictions. What they have done is nothing short of putting on a gigantic circus act to distract you from the fact that they are not really scientists doing scientific work. They use extensive, advanced mathematics and statistics; gather huge amounts of data; conduct ‘experiments’ under ‘controlled’ conditions; wear lab coats (my favorite, like a fucking commercial for anti-fungal cream); adopt complex technical jargon, acronyms, and abbreviations; and write papers inundated with formulas, graphs, tables, and a horrifically large appendix filled with data. It’s called obfuscation. You’re so inundated with the technical data and complex mathematics, that you miss the most important point of all, it’s not a real scientific experiment that can prove anything or can be reproduced.
It’s ironic that it takes a social ‘science’ to take down another social ‘science,’ but there is some value from what should actually be called social research. The psychologists correctly can demonstrate that our senses can be fooled and that we are mostly irrational actors who sometimes pursue things that are not in our best interests. However, unlike the real sciences, they can prove trends and not the actual behavior of each individual, because humans are much more complex and biased by many more factors that can’t be isolated in a lab. The very nature of social complexity means that when you isolate inputs, you’re deconstructing the entire social process that leads us to make decisions and act. You need to know all the inputs first, but then you need to reveal how each of those inputs interact with each other, and even then, emergent new processes evolve that you can’t predict. What you can surmise is that human behavior follows patterns and trends but broadly.
Unfortunately, the whole movement toward trying to make the social ‘sciences’ look more sciency has attracted rather narrow-minded, myopic technical researchers, and what you might also cynically call, drop-outs from the real sciences. So they have inferiority complexes as well as a penchant for trying to reduce human complex behavior into the most simplistic and common denominators. It’s easier if you assume that humans act like computers in fact. The last thing these sciency researchers want to do is tackle the real complexity of human behavior that someone like Shakespeare or a clinical psychologist is more familiar with. They know we’re not dealing with machines or computers. They know, profoundly, that we are dealing with emotional, irrational, dramatic, and sometimes comedic actors who create their own tragedies, because they operate on assumptions and beliefs they simply can’t abandon. They are also inextricably social beings that exist within the context of their social identities, so they’re not necessarily acting on their selfish behalf even if they could.
So why do they do it? Cynically, you can call them all charlatans, but charlatans also have a tendency of believing in their own scams. It reminds me of the last book I read about China and how many city folk go to Buddhist temples and bring all their medical issues and business problems, thinking the monks have some special power to help them. If only they commit themselves more to the Buddhist way or help build them a new temple, karma will help them overcome their problems. In a self-selection process, the ones who find some comfort or relief stick around and donate more money, so the monks start to believe in their own bullshit as well. (Also, reminds me of the chi warriors who claim they can throw people around without physical contact.)
Similarly, when the government needs to justify spending more money and going into more debt to stimulate the economy, the economists recommend more spending, more printing of money, and more debt backed by Ph.D.’s, volumes of sciency research papers, prestigious universities, etc. It’s all a big scam, but when the economy recovers (which naturally happens [just as naturally as it contracts] as people get over their panic-selling), the economists start to believe in their own bullshit and the government gives them more grant money. Economists who recommend that government just step aside and let the market naturally reset are ignore and belittled, their funding taken away. I mean really, what government agency is going to hire an economist or cite their paper that recommends the agency mind its own fucking business and wither away, because it’s actually part of the problem?
* * *
It is also fascinating how those who assume people are more simple, predictable, and rational, tend to prefer a top-down approach to managing them. Certainly, if you’re dealing with a bunch of stupid hamsters, why not control them from above? It would be more efficient to put them all in a warehouse, stick them in cages, allot food to them evenly, certainly, they’d be happier than being out in the wild where there are predators, seasonal changes, and unpredictable forces of nature. Of course, even with hamsters, the warehouse life is oppressive to them. People who accept the fact that humans are complex, unpredictable, and irrational, interestingly enough, happen to be more humane and friendly. Unlike their myopic counterparts, they have come to accept the frailty, flaws, and crazy that is humanity, and they know that you can’t control, confine, or contain it all. If you do, you get even more dysfunctional frailty, flaws, and crazy. What they know through interacting with other humans is that often when you give them the space, freedom, and support they need, they thrive, they trust, they are happier, they are kinder, they share more, and they act more, traditionally, human.
It’s notable here that it seems the vast majority of so-called disrupters in Silicon Valley fall under the myopic, technical idiot-savant category. They are uncomfortable around the unpredictable and chaotic world of social interaction, using digital media as some sort of medium that buffers them from the chaos. They can control the digital media, therefore, they can control the chaos (in their minds). In fact, they feel like gods. Tweak a little feature here, like increase the ratio of general posts to friend posts, and viola, they control people! It’s a dream come true for them to have so much power over so many people otherwise feared, misunderstood, and avoided. Unfortunately, it’s all an illusion. They are ultimately turning people off social media as people simply sense that they are being manipulated more and more, and nothing really beats face-to-face interaction. But for many people, the top-down approach does change and corrupt them. As it forces them into pigeonholes and constricts their freedoms and self-expression, they slowly, like a boiling frog, lose their senses of self and authenticity. They become fake. They start believing in manipulation and start to crave ‘likes’ and ‘friends’ over real human interaction. They become the very simpletons and machines they’re assumed to be anyway. If the only tool you have is a hammer (top-down control), then every problem becomes a nail (an anti-social, simple-minded automaton in need of top-down control).
* * *
It should be common knowledge by now that there’s grocery store product shrinkage. I know that my Tropicana OJ is getting smaller and smaller. What they don’t seem to understand is that consumers have a way of fighting back. There was a time I’d drink 14 ounces of OJ for breakfast. Now, I dilute the OJ in equal parts water and only have a 4 ounce shot in the morning, just enough to quench my thirst. (I also read somewhere that you’re not really supposed to drink a lot of orange juice as it’s condensed oranges and have a lot more sugar than your body can handle.)
Corporations and large private companies are caught in a cheapening trap which not only hurts them individually but also the entire reputation of corporations and large companies. A lot of people, especially young people, do everything possible to avoid buying corporate and big brand name shit now. Not only do they play pricing tricks, but they’re known to replace safe, natural, superior ingredients with cheap, chemical, toxic crap that harms you. Corporations and large companies can do all they want to trick you, but at the end of the day, consumers get their revenge by simply hating everything corporate to the point where now corporations are trying to hide their faces from their products, pawning their products now as small, independent, craft labels or just buying up actual small, independent, craft labels and then substituting all their ingredients with crap. A local example, a local independent company, Nature’s Bakery just sold to KIND for $400 million, and guess who owns KIND? Mars, Inc.
This reminds me of Walmart and how their megastores with shelf tricks is turning consumers off Walmart and on to Amazon. I don’t want to spend half the day walking all over an acre store just to buy underwear, toilet paper, and laundry detergent, all in different parts of the store. And when I go to buy electronic items, I don’t want to be tricked into buying a higher end product that is placed between a cheap product and a super high-end product making me think it’s a reasonable middle. All their tricks just ultimately turn consumers off, and consumers figure out new and better ways of getting what they want.
Unfortunately, just like the weapon and shield escalation, corporations are hiring ever more sophisticated consultants who attract researchers in cutting-edge psychology to trick consumers. We need books like this to defend ourselves.
* * *
One thing the book doesn’t cover is the decision-maker’s state of mind. In the last book I read, Street of Eternal Happiness, there’s a story of an old lady who keeps falling for investment scams. It seems illogical until the author points out that she had borrowed money from family to sue her husband for buying a $100K home for his mistress. You tend to take much bigger risks if you’re desperate, but unfortunately, this is why scams work so well. There are a lot of desperate people out there, and the more they get scammed, the more desperate they become. This would also explain why people in poverty tend to engage in more risky behavior including speeding, selling and using drugs, drunk driving, theft, and pursuing high risk-low payoff jobs like art, music, and sports. It would also explain why they also tend to take bigger risks in politics, voting for authoritarian candidates who want to consolidate power which means, either they turn out benevolent and help out the poor, or they turn out malevolent and use the poor as cannon fodder to fight wars.
* * *
The chapter on the casino made me think that all businesses in a sense are casinos. You enter and gamble with your money. You’re trying to get the maximum value of something without over-paying for it, while the business is doing the complete opposite, trying to get the most money from you. But these days, the larger the business, the more sophisticated they are at creating a house advantage. If you saw it this way, you would never shop at a large business. The odds are stacked against you. You would prefer to shop at small businesses where the owners are not as sophisticated or for that matter as motivated to cheat you out of your money. In fact, many small business owners are outright incompetent and are creating a virtual charity for workers and customers. You could also argue that they’re simply not greedy. Why would you ever shop at a large store? While you may argue that there is a lot of inconsistency in small businesses, and some are even more shadier than large companies, apps like Yelp quickly root them out as well as word-of-mouth.
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One tactic businesses use to hide prices is obfuscation. On travel sites, they will tell you the hotel price, but they won’t tell you the resort fee. Good luck trying to figure out a phone or cable bill. You’ll have to download it anyway from the Internet into a pdf. Do you have Adobe? But have you ever wondered just how much your dentist or doctor visit really was? All you get is the deductible. Would it shock you if your dentist visit was really $100 or $1000? So long as you just paid $30, who cares? But don’t you really end up paying in the end? Certainly, you pay in the cost of your health plan. And when government subsidizes food, you have no idea how much you’re really paying in food. And for that matter, how much do you pay in taxes each year? Have you ever tried to calculate your payroll taxes, social security taxes, and all your sales tax on top of your federal and state income taxes? Would it surprise you that over half your income goes to taxes? Unfortunately, we live in an age where big business and government have simply outwitted us with obfuscation, hiding their true prices behind a complex web of complexity and confusion. All we see if the cheap price of cereal or soda, and we think we’re getting a deal. We don’t see the high price of obesity and heart disease and higher healthcare costs that we all wind up paying for with higher healthcare premiums not to mention the slow, agonizing boiling frog of higher and higher deductibles.
The biggest problem here lies in trust. Does anyone trust hotels and airlines these days when all their fees are hidden, and when you come back from vacation, you feel cheated and your credit card bill is astronomical? What if a hotel came along and said, we charge $100 a night, and that includes taxes, fees, and we don’t have a resort fee. What would that do for your trust in that hotel? I trust Southwest more than I trust any other airline, because Southwest doesn’t have a luggage fee. Not only do I trust them not to screw me over with a luggage fee, but I also trust them not to screw me over in any other regard, and especially in safety!
So what does it say about our government when you don’t really know exactly how much you’re paying in taxes? And what about local or state governments that really get you by charging exorbitant traffic fines, court fees, jail fee, public defender fees, administrative fees, late fees, inspection fees, license reinstatement fees, facilities fees, installment payment fees, collection fees, etc.? How do you trust government which tries to raise revenue without raising taxes by simply raising fees and fines? And since poor people are likely to take bigger risks, they wind up paying a disproportionate amount in minor infraction fees not to mention the free labor they provide doing ‘community service.’ When you think of how screwed the poor are, how they also pay the most for loans, you have to realize just how screwed society is. Blaming the poor for being poor is one way the rich convince you that everyone gets what they deserve including the rich. You’re just being a gullible idiot looking down upon the poor and worshipping the rich.
What would you think of a relative or friend who agrees to lend you $100, but he charges 17.99% interest, a $20 late fee in addition to 29.99% interest past one month, and a $9.99 administrative fee? Would you trust that relative or friend? It sounds like he’s trying to take advantage of you as opposed to doing you a friendly favor for someone in need. And what if he asks for a loan in return? You’re more likely to give him the exact same treatment in return, and you would no longer even consider him a friend or trusted family member. This is essentially how we’re started to feel about big business and government. They don’t exist to watch our backs and look out for our best interests. They exist to exploit and trick us out of our money, so why should you do business with big business? Why should you support a big government for that matter? You don’t trust them to be upfront about how much money they are taxing you, subsidizing big business, or fining you for every conceivable infraction, but they’re suddenly honest and forthright about how they treat you and look out for your best interest and national security interests? You don’t really trust big business to give you quality products you truly need at a fair price, so why do you trust government to solve society’s problems like crime, homelessness, terrorism, illiteracy, poverty, hunger, and injustice??? They’re both scams. Wake up.
* * *
I started to skim the second-half of this book. The first half is theory, and the second half is loaded with short chapters on examples of research and implementation. It gets a big repetitive and redundant. At its core is the principle that we are keen at comparing two things and terrible at estimating the absolute value of things. When we see an animal in the distance, we are terrible at estimating how far away it is, but if we see two rabbits in the distant, and one appears larger than the other, we easily determine that one rabbit is closer to us than the other. Or if we see an animal next to a tree, we are good at estimating how large that animal is and how far away it is. So how much does anything cost? We have no idea until you compare it next to something else, and this is where we can be tricked. Imagine putting a fake 12-inch tree in the distance next to a dog. We would think the dog is much closer to us than the tree. The author gives example after example of how we can be tricked when something false or misleading is juxtaposed next to something we’re trying to value.
The trick is simple but has countless variations. You walk up to a stranger and ask them what time is it. Now you’ve juxtaposed a very small favor next to a larger one. You then ask if they can spare a minute to fill out an important survey. Or you ask your boss for a raise of $10/hour when in fact you only really want $5/hour more, so when your boss refuses the $10/hour raise, you propose the 50% discount of $5/hour. You walk into a store and see an espresso machine prominently displayed for $1000. Next to it is another model for $299. Your new normal is $1000, so the $299 doesn’t seem so bad. Your parents tell you that Uncle Norm is coming over, and you’ll have to share a bedroom with your brother. Uncle Norm is a grotesque, loud, smelly character. Then you tell them Uncle Norm cancelled and Aunt Jesse is actually coming over. Now your kids are enthralled about sharing rooms! The only problem is you can only do this so many times before someone catches on. After that, you’re outed as a manipulator and deceiver. Nothing you say can be trusted anymore. Can you even believe that there are consultant companies that big business hires to scam, cheat, and deceive you? What does that say about big business? What if we hired a consultant company to scam, cheat, and deceive big business? It’s basically like they’re at war with us and don’t consider us valued customers but rather stupid marks and enemies to be conquered and exploited.
* * *
A couple chapters cover testosterone and CEO salaries, and it’s unsurprising that men love to hoard wealth. The problem with modern human men is that much like other male animals, they are driven to hoard resources as a display of fitness. Testosterone also makes them more driven to social dominance which is displayed through wealth, status, and power. Bowerbirds are a great example of how the male birds collect items to build a large display. Nature, however, has limits on individuals collecting material wealth. You can only hoard so much before you have to sleep, and competing males can easily steal or destroy your collection. There’s also so much an individual can carry away in his arms before getting tired. With the advent of money, your wealth can now be stored digitally in a safe bank account. In other words, you can hoard as never before without ever fearing your wealth being stolen. This has created the gigantic wealth discrepancy for humanity as well as a new class of living beings that have inordinate power, wealth, and influence over everyone else and nature itself. This creates unsustainable systems where resources are depleted, biodiversity is diminished, and the habitat is degraded and destroyed. Instead of working more to earn more, they rely on rent seeking, simply gaming the system to steal wealth from others without adding any value to the economy. They are essentially, harmful parasites. When rent seekers dominate the economy, as happens in most Third World Countries, the economy collapses. When applied to the world, the world collapses. Is anyone bothered by this? I love the term, ‘rent-seekers.’ They’re assholes who don’t work and live off the hard work of others by scamming them. In the past, they were called aristocrats. In the past, they were beheaded. Just saying.
It is my conjecture that if humanity is to survive much longer, we will ultimately have to forgo with males. With robots and artificial insemination, you really don’t need men. Humanlike robots could replace human males to keep women company and provide cuddling and sexual services. Hell, give them fur and make them purr like cats. Robot soldiers would provide human females with sufficient security from possible hostile beings on Earth and extraterrestrial. The opposite would be more complicated. It would take more technology to raise fetuses without a human womb, and men wouldn’t be as interested in raising children. In fact, men wouldn’t want male children which one day would become their competitors. Men would ultimately kill off each other until there was only one man left standing with all the wealth. In fact, that last man might as well kill off all the women and create robot women who didn’t talk back or think for themselves. I’m not entirely sure a super AI would allow that to happen as opposed to simply eradicating all men and allowing more collaborative women to flourish. A non-male future for humanity seems more likely than a non-female one.
Priceless: The Hidden Psychology of Value by William Poundstone
When I was in college studying Economics, one of the first things we learned is the idea that each individual is a rational decision-maker with perfect information and therefore pursues a transaction that completely improves his position, and the entire field of Economics is predicated on this assumption. It’s no surprise that when psychologists come along and argue that this is simply not true, the economists would throw the biggest of academic hissy fits. This touches upon one of the most fundamental problems with both Economics and Psychology. We are taught that these are the ‘social sciences’ and their researchers are scientists. What we are not taught or reminded about is that science is about predicting an outcome by controlling inputs. The social sciences have yet to predict anything except the obvious destructive predictions like dropping an atomic bomb on Miami would reduce Miami’s productive capacities in the short-term. In fact, there’s a crisis in the ‘social sciences’ of failing to reproduce their experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
If you think about it, nobody should really be surprised that non-scientists aren’t doing scientific work. What’s surprising is that so many people have fallen for their scam. The scam goes something like this. If you quack like a duck, glue feathers on to yourself, and wear a plastic duck bill, people might assume you’re a duck. What the social ‘scientists’ have done is act like real scientists in every way except the most important parts, predicting things and creating experiments you can reproduce to confirm the predictions. What they have done is nothing short of putting on a gigantic circus act to distract you from the fact that they are not really scientists doing scientific work. They use extensive, advanced mathematics and statistics; gather huge amounts of data; conduct ‘experiments’ under ‘controlled’ conditions; wear lab coats (my favorite, like a fucking commercial for anti-fungal cream); adopt complex technical jargon, acronyms, and abbreviations; and write papers inundated with formulas, graphs, tables, and a horrifically large appendix filled with data. It’s called obfuscation. You’re so inundated with the technical data and complex mathematics, that you miss the most important point of all, it’s not a real scientific experiment that can prove anything or can be reproduced.
It’s ironic that it takes a social ‘science’ to take down another social ‘science,’ but there is some value from what should actually be called social research. The psychologists correctly can demonstrate that our senses can be fooled and that we are mostly irrational actors who sometimes pursue things that are not in our best interests. However, unlike the real sciences, they can prove trends and not the actual behavior of each individual, because humans are much more complex and biased by many more factors that can’t be isolated in a lab. The very nature of social complexity means that when you isolate inputs, you’re deconstructing the entire social process that leads us to make decisions and act. You need to know all the inputs first, but then you need to reveal how each of those inputs interact with each other, and even then, emergent new processes evolve that you can’t predict. What you can surmise is that human behavior follows patterns and trends but broadly.
Unfortunately, the whole movement toward trying to make the social ‘sciences’ look more sciency has attracted rather narrow-minded, myopic technical researchers, and what you might also cynically call, drop-outs from the real sciences. So they have inferiority complexes as well as a penchant for trying to reduce human complex behavior into the most simplistic and common denominators. It’s easier if you assume that humans act like computers in fact. The last thing these sciency researchers want to do is tackle the real complexity of human behavior that someone like Shakespeare or a clinical psychologist is more familiar with. They know we’re not dealing with machines or computers. They know, profoundly, that we are dealing with emotional, irrational, dramatic, and sometimes comedic actors who create their own tragedies, because they operate on assumptions and beliefs they simply can’t abandon. They are also inextricably social beings that exist within the context of their social identities, so they’re not necessarily acting on their selfish behalf even if they could.
So why do they do it? Cynically, you can call them all charlatans, but charlatans also have a tendency of believing in their own scams. It reminds me of the last book I read about China and how many city folk go to Buddhist temples and bring all their medical issues and business problems, thinking the monks have some special power to help them. If only they commit themselves more to the Buddhist way or help build them a new temple, karma will help them overcome their problems. In a self-selection process, the ones who find some comfort or relief stick around and donate more money, so the monks start to believe in their own bullshit as well. (Also, reminds me of the chi warriors who claim they can throw people around without physical contact.)
Similarly, when the government needs to justify spending more money and going into more debt to stimulate the economy, the economists recommend more spending, more printing of money, and more debt backed by Ph.D.’s, volumes of sciency research papers, prestigious universities, etc. It’s all a big scam, but when the economy recovers (which naturally happens [just as naturally as it contracts] as people get over their panic-selling), the economists start to believe in their own bullshit and the government gives them more grant money. Economists who recommend that government just step aside and let the market naturally reset are ignore and belittled, their funding taken away. I mean really, what government agency is going to hire an economist or cite their paper that recommends the agency mind its own fucking business and wither away, because it’s actually part of the problem?
* * *
It is also fascinating how those who assume people are more simple, predictable, and rational, tend to prefer a top-down approach to managing them. Certainly, if you’re dealing with a bunch of stupid hamsters, why not control them from above? It would be more efficient to put them all in a warehouse, stick them in cages, allot food to them evenly, certainly, they’d be happier than being out in the wild where there are predators, seasonal changes, and unpredictable forces of nature. Of course, even with hamsters, the warehouse life is oppressive to them. People who accept the fact that humans are complex, unpredictable, and irrational, interestingly enough, happen to be more humane and friendly. Unlike their myopic counterparts, they have come to accept the frailty, flaws, and crazy that is humanity, and they know that you can’t control, confine, or contain it all. If you do, you get even more dysfunctional frailty, flaws, and crazy. What they know through interacting with other humans is that often when you give them the space, freedom, and support they need, they thrive, they trust, they are happier, they are kinder, they share more, and they act more, traditionally, human.
It’s notable here that it seems the vast majority of so-called disrupters in Silicon Valley fall under the myopic, technical idiot-savant category. They are uncomfortable around the unpredictable and chaotic world of social interaction, using digital media as some sort of medium that buffers them from the chaos. They can control the digital media, therefore, they can control the chaos (in their minds). In fact, they feel like gods. Tweak a little feature here, like increase the ratio of general posts to friend posts, and viola, they control people! It’s a dream come true for them to have so much power over so many people otherwise feared, misunderstood, and avoided. Unfortunately, it’s all an illusion. They are ultimately turning people off social media as people simply sense that they are being manipulated more and more, and nothing really beats face-to-face interaction. But for many people, the top-down approach does change and corrupt them. As it forces them into pigeonholes and constricts their freedoms and self-expression, they slowly, like a boiling frog, lose their senses of self and authenticity. They become fake. They start believing in manipulation and start to crave ‘likes’ and ‘friends’ over real human interaction. They become the very simpletons and machines they’re assumed to be anyway. If the only tool you have is a hammer (top-down control), then every problem becomes a nail (an anti-social, simple-minded automaton in need of top-down control).
* * *
It should be common knowledge by now that there’s grocery store product shrinkage. I know that my Tropicana OJ is getting smaller and smaller. What they don’t seem to understand is that consumers have a way of fighting back. There was a time I’d drink 14 ounces of OJ for breakfast. Now, I dilute the OJ in equal parts water and only have a 4 ounce shot in the morning, just enough to quench my thirst. (I also read somewhere that you’re not really supposed to drink a lot of orange juice as it’s condensed oranges and have a lot more sugar than your body can handle.)
Corporations and large private companies are caught in a cheapening trap which not only hurts them individually but also the entire reputation of corporations and large companies. A lot of people, especially young people, do everything possible to avoid buying corporate and big brand name shit now. Not only do they play pricing tricks, but they’re known to replace safe, natural, superior ingredients with cheap, chemical, toxic crap that harms you. Corporations and large companies can do all they want to trick you, but at the end of the day, consumers get their revenge by simply hating everything corporate to the point where now corporations are trying to hide their faces from their products, pawning their products now as small, independent, craft labels or just buying up actual small, independent, craft labels and then substituting all their ingredients with crap. A local example, a local independent company, Nature’s Bakery just sold to KIND for $400 million, and guess who owns KIND? Mars, Inc.
This reminds me of Walmart and how their megastores with shelf tricks is turning consumers off Walmart and on to Amazon. I don’t want to spend half the day walking all over an acre store just to buy underwear, toilet paper, and laundry detergent, all in different parts of the store. And when I go to buy electronic items, I don’t want to be tricked into buying a higher end product that is placed between a cheap product and a super high-end product making me think it’s a reasonable middle. All their tricks just ultimately turn consumers off, and consumers figure out new and better ways of getting what they want.
Unfortunately, just like the weapon and shield escalation, corporations are hiring ever more sophisticated consultants who attract researchers in cutting-edge psychology to trick consumers. We need books like this to defend ourselves.
* * *
One thing the book doesn’t cover is the decision-maker’s state of mind. In the last book I read, Street of Eternal Happiness, there’s a story of an old lady who keeps falling for investment scams. It seems illogical until the author points out that she had borrowed money from family to sue her husband for buying a $100K home for his mistress. You tend to take much bigger risks if you’re desperate, but unfortunately, this is why scams work so well. There are a lot of desperate people out there, and the more they get scammed, the more desperate they become. This would also explain why people in poverty tend to engage in more risky behavior including speeding, selling and using drugs, drunk driving, theft, and pursuing high risk-low payoff jobs like art, music, and sports. It would also explain why they also tend to take bigger risks in politics, voting for authoritarian candidates who want to consolidate power which means, either they turn out benevolent and help out the poor, or they turn out malevolent and use the poor as cannon fodder to fight wars.
* * *
The chapter on the casino made me think that all businesses in a sense are casinos. You enter and gamble with your money. You’re trying to get the maximum value of something without over-paying for it, while the business is doing the complete opposite, trying to get the most money from you. But these days, the larger the business, the more sophisticated they are at creating a house advantage. If you saw it this way, you would never shop at a large business. The odds are stacked against you. You would prefer to shop at small businesses where the owners are not as sophisticated or for that matter as motivated to cheat you out of your money. In fact, many small business owners are outright incompetent and are creating a virtual charity for workers and customers. You could also argue that they’re simply not greedy. Why would you ever shop at a large store? While you may argue that there is a lot of inconsistency in small businesses, and some are even more shadier than large companies, apps like Yelp quickly root them out as well as word-of-mouth.
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One tactic businesses use to hide prices is obfuscation. On travel sites, they will tell you the hotel price, but they won’t tell you the resort fee. Good luck trying to figure out a phone or cable bill. You’ll have to download it anyway from the Internet into a pdf. Do you have Adobe? But have you ever wondered just how much your dentist or doctor visit really was? All you get is the deductible. Would it shock you if your dentist visit was really $100 or $1000? So long as you just paid $30, who cares? But don’t you really end up paying in the end? Certainly, you pay in the cost of your health plan. And when government subsidizes food, you have no idea how much you’re really paying in food. And for that matter, how much do you pay in taxes each year? Have you ever tried to calculate your payroll taxes, social security taxes, and all your sales tax on top of your federal and state income taxes? Would it surprise you that over half your income goes to taxes? Unfortunately, we live in an age where big business and government have simply outwitted us with obfuscation, hiding their true prices behind a complex web of complexity and confusion. All we see if the cheap price of cereal or soda, and we think we’re getting a deal. We don’t see the high price of obesity and heart disease and higher healthcare costs that we all wind up paying for with higher healthcare premiums not to mention the slow, agonizing boiling frog of higher and higher deductibles.
The biggest problem here lies in trust. Does anyone trust hotels and airlines these days when all their fees are hidden, and when you come back from vacation, you feel cheated and your credit card bill is astronomical? What if a hotel came along and said, we charge $100 a night, and that includes taxes, fees, and we don’t have a resort fee. What would that do for your trust in that hotel? I trust Southwest more than I trust any other airline, because Southwest doesn’t have a luggage fee. Not only do I trust them not to screw me over with a luggage fee, but I also trust them not to screw me over in any other regard, and especially in safety!
So what does it say about our government when you don’t really know exactly how much you’re paying in taxes? And what about local or state governments that really get you by charging exorbitant traffic fines, court fees, jail fee, public defender fees, administrative fees, late fees, inspection fees, license reinstatement fees, facilities fees, installment payment fees, collection fees, etc.? How do you trust government which tries to raise revenue without raising taxes by simply raising fees and fines? And since poor people are likely to take bigger risks, they wind up paying a disproportionate amount in minor infraction fees not to mention the free labor they provide doing ‘community service.’ When you think of how screwed the poor are, how they also pay the most for loans, you have to realize just how screwed society is. Blaming the poor for being poor is one way the rich convince you that everyone gets what they deserve including the rich. You’re just being a gullible idiot looking down upon the poor and worshipping the rich.
What would you think of a relative or friend who agrees to lend you $100, but he charges 17.99% interest, a $20 late fee in addition to 29.99% interest past one month, and a $9.99 administrative fee? Would you trust that relative or friend? It sounds like he’s trying to take advantage of you as opposed to doing you a friendly favor for someone in need. And what if he asks for a loan in return? You’re more likely to give him the exact same treatment in return, and you would no longer even consider him a friend or trusted family member. This is essentially how we’re started to feel about big business and government. They don’t exist to watch our backs and look out for our best interests. They exist to exploit and trick us out of our money, so why should you do business with big business? Why should you support a big government for that matter? You don’t trust them to be upfront about how much money they are taxing you, subsidizing big business, or fining you for every conceivable infraction, but they’re suddenly honest and forthright about how they treat you and look out for your best interest and national security interests? You don’t really trust big business to give you quality products you truly need at a fair price, so why do you trust government to solve society’s problems like crime, homelessness, terrorism, illiteracy, poverty, hunger, and injustice??? They’re both scams. Wake up.
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I started to skim the second-half of this book. The first half is theory, and the second half is loaded with short chapters on examples of research and implementation. It gets a big repetitive and redundant. At its core is the principle that we are keen at comparing two things and terrible at estimating the absolute value of things. When we see an animal in the distance, we are terrible at estimating how far away it is, but if we see two rabbits in the distant, and one appears larger than the other, we easily determine that one rabbit is closer to us than the other. Or if we see an animal next to a tree, we are good at estimating how large that animal is and how far away it is. So how much does anything cost? We have no idea until you compare it next to something else, and this is where we can be tricked. Imagine putting a fake 12-inch tree in the distance next to a dog. We would think the dog is much closer to us than the tree. The author gives example after example of how we can be tricked when something false or misleading is juxtaposed next to something we’re trying to value.
The trick is simple but has countless variations. You walk up to a stranger and ask them what time is it. Now you’ve juxtaposed a very small favor next to a larger one. You then ask if they can spare a minute to fill out an important survey. Or you ask your boss for a raise of $10/hour when in fact you only really want $5/hour more, so when your boss refuses the $10/hour raise, you propose the 50% discount of $5/hour. You walk into a store and see an espresso machine prominently displayed for $1000. Next to it is another model for $299. Your new normal is $1000, so the $299 doesn’t seem so bad. Your parents tell you that Uncle Norm is coming over, and you’ll have to share a bedroom with your brother. Uncle Norm is a grotesque, loud, smelly character. Then you tell them Uncle Norm cancelled and Aunt Jesse is actually coming over. Now your kids are enthralled about sharing rooms! The only problem is you can only do this so many times before someone catches on. After that, you’re outed as a manipulator and deceiver. Nothing you say can be trusted anymore. Can you even believe that there are consultant companies that big business hires to scam, cheat, and deceive you? What does that say about big business? What if we hired a consultant company to scam, cheat, and deceive big business? It’s basically like they’re at war with us and don’t consider us valued customers but rather stupid marks and enemies to be conquered and exploited.
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A couple chapters cover testosterone and CEO salaries, and it’s unsurprising that men love to hoard wealth. The problem with modern human men is that much like other male animals, they are driven to hoard resources as a display of fitness. Testosterone also makes them more driven to social dominance which is displayed through wealth, status, and power. Bowerbirds are a great example of how the male birds collect items to build a large display. Nature, however, has limits on individuals collecting material wealth. You can only hoard so much before you have to sleep, and competing males can easily steal or destroy your collection. There’s also so much an individual can carry away in his arms before getting tired. With the advent of money, your wealth can now be stored digitally in a safe bank account. In other words, you can hoard as never before without ever fearing your wealth being stolen. This has created the gigantic wealth discrepancy for humanity as well as a new class of living beings that have inordinate power, wealth, and influence over everyone else and nature itself. This creates unsustainable systems where resources are depleted, biodiversity is diminished, and the habitat is degraded and destroyed. Instead of working more to earn more, they rely on rent seeking, simply gaming the system to steal wealth from others without adding any value to the economy. They are essentially, harmful parasites. When rent seekers dominate the economy, as happens in most Third World Countries, the economy collapses. When applied to the world, the world collapses. Is anyone bothered by this? I love the term, ‘rent-seekers.’ They’re assholes who don’t work and live off the hard work of others by scamming them. In the past, they were called aristocrats. In the past, they were beheaded. Just saying.
It is my conjecture that if humanity is to survive much longer, we will ultimately have to forgo with males. With robots and artificial insemination, you really don’t need men. Humanlike robots could replace human males to keep women company and provide cuddling and sexual services. Hell, give them fur and make them purr like cats. Robot soldiers would provide human females with sufficient security from possible hostile beings on Earth and extraterrestrial. The opposite would be more complicated. It would take more technology to raise fetuses without a human womb, and men wouldn’t be as interested in raising children. In fact, men wouldn’t want male children which one day would become their competitors. Men would ultimately kill off each other until there was only one man left standing with all the wealth. In fact, that last man might as well kill off all the women and create robot women who didn’t talk back or think for themselves. I’m not entirely sure a super AI would allow that to happen as opposed to simply eradicating all men and allowing more collaborative women to flourish. A non-male future for humanity seems more likely than a non-female one.
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