Status: Draft published: Not ready for comment (rough/contains questionable elements)
These posts are intended to open up discussion about Value Prospecting infrastructure design.
Society needs decision support and information systems that make more information and wider horizons more accessible. It needs a more representative picture of what people naturally feel is of value (individually and collectively) and an agenda that reflects that.
The graphic above shows the distribution of material wealth in the world (circa 2015), and is associated with massive disparities in power, opportunity and material privilage. The disparity results primarily from the activities of those with this power and is currently growing.
When faced with the personal realities, experiences and suffering that inevitably follow from this distribution of wealth, nearly everyone has a sense of ‘unfairness’, perhaps even ‘disgust’. Two of the essential and sometimes competing characteristics of primate social life being a finely tuned sense of fairness and of hierarchy.
In this post I would like to set aside these instinctive responses and look more dispassionately at how the disparity affects our societal and civilisational agenda. What would be our ‘natural’ and underlying interests and concerns, if we had not been subjected to advertising and influencing?
What is the human cost of directing the energy, creativity and thoughtfulness of our society and especially our young people by accepting the manufactured and self serving public agenda promoted by advertising aimed at those with money and power.
I don’t know, what the cost is but I can provide an alternate and relatively unbiased agenda, simply by providing equal weight to the representation to each persons values.
This post is not an antagonistic ethical polemic relating to the selfishness of those who have wealth, power and opportunity by accident of birth.
I view the social dynamic entirely differently, prefering to see the common humanity of all. We all exist to some extent in localised echo chambers of communications and restricted horizons. We all operate with habituated expectations, and outdated norms. We vary and that is to be respected and celebrated.
Those feeling defensive and sensitive about the privileges they enjoy are not bad people, any more than those who do not. They are just people like you and me, people who don’t need and will not be persuaded by an antagonistic argument. The Value Prospecting application is intended to make it easy to connect with how it feels like to be less privileged materially. Provided we are aware of this, then we may, in time, choose to make friends in need wherever they are, into actual, personal, ‘friends indeed’.
Surely in the mixed economies of (say) Western Europe, the actual agenda is quite balanced?
If the government/administrative budget in the UK (Western Europe is similar) is 43% of GDP then it would be fair to argue that to this extent 43% of GDP is allocated to expressing the citizens social values rather than commercial value or the values of the elite.
The UK charity sector is about 5% of GDP and may also be said to be motivated or to express somewhat the social values of citizens. Even so proportionately, Dogs, Cats and diseases of affluence rate higher than more effective efforts to provide clean water and sewage in the third world.
But what of the 50% of GDP that is allocated by business and commercial enterprise. This sector allocates resources, reactivly and essentially based on the preferences of those with the ability to pay.
More (much more) analysis would be required to document a compelling understanding of these resource flows. There are plenty of references online that say approx. 60% of Global GDP is allocated to consumer goods. I don’t know exactly what they mean by ‘consumer goods’, but my primary assertion is:-
The advertising sector competes hardest in the luxury sector, reflecting the desires of those with the most power and money, harnessing and emphasising drives underlying competitive social status, appearances. Advertising promotes the use of fear as a motivator (health, insurance in general, low self esteem), promoting myths that status depends on how you appear not who you really are (or who your friends are). Advertising seeks to show that happiness can be bought (material acquisition, alcohol, sold experiences, drugs like nicotine, alcohol+++).
Even though in many economies, there is public sector that largely or wholley allocates resources on the basis of egalitarian social values, it does not publicise or otherwise assert these values into the social consciousness. It does not set the social agenda not harness the imagination enthusiasm and creative talents of the general population or the young.
In terms of influential lifestyle advertising and related agendas, much of the domestic expenditure on utilities and services are not discretionary, they are, or are viewed as, essentials. The basic demand is inelastic, traditionally (in the UK) there is little or no agenda bending advertising for what I would call non discretionary spending.
However the marketing strategy of ‘up-selling’ is present in all purchasing where ‘consumer choice’ could be said to play a role. We do not often choose even the most mundane of foods or consummer goods solely on the ‘rational actor’ basis of low lifetime/lifecycle costs.
One perspective into the role of upselling and the subjective perception of what consitutes ‘essential services’ is that given by comparing the GDP per capita when my Grandparents were born (1900) and in 2015
Thts a 6 times (600%) increase in GDP per head. Unless we believe that we could live reasonably on 16% of our current average income, our material expectations and norms have changed.
So that leaves us with discretionary spending (in the UK at least 20% of domestic spending or 12% of GDP tand takes us back to the distribution of wealth and especially the distribution of ‘disposable income’. Here is the core of competition that can be switched and directed by attention grabbing advertising.
There is another effect of advertising – a long term one way exposure to which tends to emphasise that happiness demands an erver growing and increasing personal expenditure on aquiring stuss and expensive experiences. this is plainly wrong, we need love it’s not a material or an expensive thing and it does not damage the environment or life support capacity…
This link contains the gem that 123,000 individual people controled 45% of the global wealth in 2015.
GDP per capita in England 1270-2015
IMF information Panel on Government as a proportion of National GDP