Pam Peirce

What people want is a peaceful life, freedom from disruptions of their access to the goods they want (heat, cooling, a comfortable bed, plenty of food, etc.) and that their children should have the same. I had planned to analyze these desires carefully, and also to say that I don't think humans, as a species, know how to run an economy based on money such that all of its members have their basic needs met. I still plan to do this, but my plan is interrupted by a strong feeling that there is a target on my back for being an intellectual, a feminist, even for being in favor of following the U.S. Constitution.
      I have been led to undertake a history of tariffs, to try to predict the outcome of the federal administration's foray into these economic weapons. I turned to Chat GPT to find a summary of U.S. tariffs and their results. (Try it—it's free and easy. Ask your economic/ historical questions at chatgpt.com.)
     The U.S had tariffs against England following the War of 1812. Thos tariffs did strengthen U.S manufacturing and reduced reliance on imports. During the Civil War, tariffs helped the North pay for the War, but "hurt Southern farmers that depended on exporting cotton and tobacco."
      Trump claims to admire America's Gilded Age, when there were huge discrepancies between the rich and poor. Tariffs of that era strengthened industry, but retaliatory tariffs hurt farmers who were involved in international trade. In 1922, tariffs helped both industry and farmers, resulting in a booming economy in the 1920s, but strapping Europe, which was trying to pay war debts, and hurting world trade in general. (Many Europeans suffered great privation from WWI until some years after WWII.)
The Smoot-Hawley tariffs, set in 1930 on over 20,000 manufactured goods, resulted in "massive global retaliation" and are credited with worsening the Great Depression.
Trump declared tariffs in his first administration, with mixed results. While they did protect some industries, like steel and aluminum, there were retaliatory tariffs that especially harmed U.S. farmers, "some manufacturing job benefited but others (like auto and tech) suffered." Overall, there were "increased costs and trade disruptions." Also, they "did not significantly reduce the trade deficit with China."
When asked if steep tariffs would rebuild U.S. manufacturing, Chat GPT said while they can help certain industries and create some jobs, they also raise costs, invite retaliation, and do not guarantee large-scale job growth. It also said that tariffs used to work better than they do now. Why is that I asked? It said: the 19th century U.S. economy was largely self-contained, with international trade a much smaller share of the GDP, and had far less dependence on imports. However now, we are "deeply integrated into global trade" and "many nations have strong manufacturing sectors" where business can go. Tariffs may help specific industries, but often lead to "retaliation, supply chain disruption, and higher consumer prices."
The conclusion? Risky business, tariffs, these days, that are not likely to help most MAGA voters. I am back to my original thesis—that humans are not very good at dealing with money economies.

The radicalism of the American revolution was that it was founded on horizontal relationships among people, not vertical. European monarchies included formal hierarchies.  The king was at the top and he was assumed to be ruling by divine right—his family was favored by God to provide the ruler.
     Then there was the nobility, who had the right to own land and be above commoners. but not to rule the nation. Below them were common people, who would always remain common people. The bourgeois, people who owned businesses, had begun to exist. Their business might give them some power, but they were still commoners.
     "Sumptuary laws" were the ones intended to keep people in their place. You might be a rich commoner, but you were still not permitted to wear certain cloth, or cloth dyed a certain color, for example.
     In the book The Hidden Injuries of Class, the authors, Richard Sennet and Jonathan Cobb, posit that the class is harder for Americans, because they imagine that they can rise in class—there is no belief system standing in the way. In a hierarchical society, there are "humble people," ones who know that rising in the class structure is not possible, so they don't even think about it. However, some Americans imagine that they should be able to become middle or upper class—there are no laws against it—and are bitterly disappointed when they do not.
     The worm at the core of the American apple was, of course, that the founders were thinking of white men with property, who were all to be equal. Americans were allowed to make exceptions for black slaves, and no one even thought of women as representing anything other than the status of their husbands. (I suppose that unmarried women were subsumed under the class status of the family member with whom they lived.) Nevertheless, we have come to a place in history in which many Americans take the promise of equality in the ability to rise quite seriously and are deeply dissatisfied when they cannot find a way to "move up."

Studies show that people with little money or wealth believe in luck as a means of becoming wealthy far more strongly than those who have more money or wealth. Poor people know they have little, but they have a greater hope that they will be lucky and acquire more. Hence the success of lotteries and gambling. Those who have money to invest (that is money beyond what they need to live), are more likely to invest it, or at least a good part of it, in something a bit more certain. (Though these days uncertainty is dogging even what used to be conservative investments do to our destabilizing presedent.)
In general, humans are gamblers. They risk a lot for possible gain. They sail in a small boat across an ocean, try to fly, risk all on business ideas that are doomed to fail. This kind of strategy has proven good for the species. We have moved about the globe, created various means of flight, and created businesses that have done very well. It has not worked out so well for individuals, whose boat sunk, flying machine crashed, or failed business put them in debt for decades.
This reckless optimism is built into our brains. Honeybees, another successful species, have a different brain structure. They send out scouts to find sources of pollen to feed their young. They only follow the scouts who are quite sure there is enough pollen somewhere to warrant many workers gathering it. For a little pollen, they don't go. Humans buy a lottery ticket with a huge payout. Several million tickets have been sold too. That means that the chance of winning is one in millions. But the human brain doesn't work that way. The human thinks: "Let's see, I could win, or I could lose. That's 50-50, right?"
The difference between the lottery and gambling at a casino is that no one is going to try to guilt trip you into buying a lottery ticket. They will market it to you, trying to convince you that it will make you happier to buy one, or even that it is a magnanimous act to buy one for someone else. However, I'm sure the marketing department first determined that if people bought tickets as gifts, they would not buy fewer for themselves, because the point of advertising is to grow the market, not dilute it.
A casino will try to guilt trip players into returning. They will send reminders  to frequent gamblers that "they haven't seen you in a while." They will offer discounted or free accommodations if you return. They will offer free golf games--whatever it takes. They hope, of course, that if you take these perks, you will feel guilty enough to return again. (One player gambled away an entire inheritance in order to of avoid guilt. They never stopped to think that if a casino could afford these perks, they probably were doing fine by taking the money of gamblers just like them—including them.)
A lottery is the same without the coercion, and humans, at least Americans, buy a lot of them. In 2023, the 13 states with lotteries sold 80 million tickets. My brother, who doesn't expect to win, and has enough to live on comfortably without winning, buys a few tickets a week as a contribution to California schools, which do, indeed, get .95 of each lottery dollar. I suppose this is gambling, but it is restrained gambling. But those who really need the money from winning, farmworkers who labor long days and barely make ends meet, line up to buy lottery tickets every day, in hopes of obtaining that comfort. The odds of winning are strongly against both my brother and them.

     Here is another example of seeking an emotional response from voters rather than an educated one. Trump gets his followers laugh at people who "know things"—educated people. In his speech to congress, he spoke of canceling a grant that was meant to aid the nation of Lesotho. He added, intending for people to laugh, that nobody has ever heard of Lesotho. Well, I have. It is a mountainous nation completely surrounded by South Africa. Wikipedia says it has a population of 2 million people that are 99.7% of one tribal group, the Basotho. It has 2 official languages, that of the tribal people and English.
 
     The nation of Lesotho was not amused. Representatives of the nation have complained loudly, wanting the world to know that they are a member of the United Nations, with a permanent U.S. diplomatic mission and a previously positive relationship with the U.S. They are not a rich nation, and the sudden end of U.S. aid will be extremely disruptive to their efforts to combat HIV AIDS. They had been depending on U.S. aid to help them fight that scourge, though they say they recognize the right of the U.S. to discontinue its aid. (They have the second highest rate of HIV AIDS of any nation, and women are a high proportion of the infected.)
 
     The current president often throws out such comments in his speeches. I generally take them to mean that he, himself, had never heard of whatever he says others have not heard of. (Whether he actually has not heard of what he claims he has not is moot, but I think is quite possible that he has not heard of it, or if he once learned it, maybe in a school class,  he has quite forgotten it.)
 
     The political reason he says "nobody even knows what that means," or "nobody knows this" is to signal that  "I am one of you. I am also poorly educated."   He can get away with this at his rallies. In fact, at one Las Vegas rally, in 2016, he said, "I love the poorly educated." But with a national (and international) audience, such nonsense plays less well.

I am angered when I hear politicians cite the price of eggs as an index of inflation. Yes, eggs are very expensive. But they are an exception that has nothing to do with inflation in general. I do not know all of the reasons for general inflation, but I am sure they have to do, in large part, with the economy trying to recover from the Covid 19 crisis, The prices of eggs are high because a virus, bird flu, is leading to the killing of many egg laying hens. By law, if bird flu appears in a flock, it is "culled," a polite term for killing the whole flock.
     "Isn't there a vaccine?" you may ask. Well, yes, there is a vaccine. However, some markets will not buy chickens intended for meat if they have been vaccinated, so the vaccine goes unused. 
     The big fear is that the bird flu virus will mutate such that it can be transmitted human to human. So far, it has only infected humans who work with animals, such as chickens or cows, which can spread the virus to a human. (And domestic cate, which eat infected wild birds, leading to the irony that people may keep their cats inside, not to spare the wild birds, but to protect the cats.) It could happen that the bird flu virus could become transmissible between humans, and then the clamor for using the vaccine would probably outweigh the resistance to using it, however, by then the time would have passed that using the vaccine might prevent human deaths due to human-to-human transmission.
     Trump used the example of the price of eggs in his speech to Congress--blaming it on Biden. I also get fundraising emails from candidates representing the Democratic Party implying that egg prices are a part of a general inflation that the current president cannot bring down. I am equally outraged by both uses, because they depend, for their power, on an emotional response that is not influenced  by facts that explain why eggs are so expensive.
I don't know if the price of eggs went up because some producers, or wholesalers, would go out of business if they didn't raise prices, or if the problem is price gouging, but I do know that egg prices are a special case and that politicians are trying use them for political gain without educating the electorate about bird flu and helping people see the dilemmas it introduces.
(Details of the bird flu situation were recently reported on National Public Radio.)

    Someone has initiated a weeklong boycott of Amazon (which includes Whole Foods.), starting today. I don't use Amazon anyway, but my husband buys eggs at Whole Foods, which seems to be using them as a "loss leader," a product they are selling at a loss to attract customers. I go with him and have bought an occasional sale item myself. I have told him to go alone this week, so I won't be tempted to buy anything.

     I was interested to read some of the comments on "FaceBook" about the boycott of Amazon. One person wrote that their son worked for Amazon so they couldn't boycott it. A number of people agreed, saying they had relatives employed by Amazon. How sad that money is so powerful. My personal opinion is that they can boycott. Sadly, there is not a likelihood that someone will lose a job because of a weeklong boycott. And it is a statement of preference. We are saying we prefer not to have one massive source for every object we desire, and one extremely rich, powerful person making money off of us. 

     Bezos changed the editorial policy of the Washington Post last week to make the op eds only conservative. Now that he owns the paper, he can change its direction. 

     A friend who was inspired by my recent post on Amazon said she found that a short period of searching on the web quickly and easily found another source for the item. 

So, we have a president who won on a Republican ticket, a party that favors business. The goal of a republican ticket is usually to make it easier for businesses to make money. One way to do that is to deregulate business. But some regulation is critical to the well-being of the people of the nation. We want government to prevent fake drugs, adulterated food, horrid working conditions, child labor, and citizens with no access to even basic health care.
Pure capitalism puts all money, land, and labor into markets. In such a system, no one benefits from free anything—capital, land, or labor. The government takes a hands-off approach, trusting the "free market" to make the economy work. Adam Smith said that pure self-interest would run such an economy successfully Though the words sound OK, at least plausible, such an economy has never existed. People have always seen that it is not in their interest to allow market capitalism to run its course and have demanded that some regulation take place.
Some of the followers of the current president would support pure market capitalism, and his policies do lean in the direction of support for business, but the president's motivation is much more complicated than that. He is also driven by revenge, as we can see by his pardons of those who stormed Congress on January 6, 2020. He is driven by racism, as we can see by his attempting to end diversity programs. He is driven by sexism too, killing any spending that studies improving the status of women, though he likes to keep very pretty young women around in prominent positions, to show he cares about women. And he is driven by hostility to efforts to confront and mediate the climate crisis, as evidenced by his jokes about low-flow toilets and wind farms and by his "drill, baby, drill" motto. But he is driven most strongly by a desire to have power and personal wealth. So, he will say whatever he thinks will win an election, get him the biggest donations, and will support policies that will allow him to amass the greatest personal and family wealth.
People will be harmed by his economic policies—both abroad and within the nation. People will die with such an abrupt end to US foreign aid. Within our nation, many people cannot avail themselves of a market economy because they are too ill to work, and those people will suffer. Children will suffer. People discriminated against will suffer. People will suffer and die if Medicaid is cut in order to keep a tax cut for billionaires.
Hopefully, the culture of America has already passed the point that his racist anti-diversity opinions and his denial of a climate crisis can halt progress on diversity and on fighting climate change. I see the ads on TV that normalize being black and having white neighbors, even white spouses, a decent job and income,etc. This means that the large corporations that pay for these ads think that ending racism is in their interest. I think even some large corporations are investing in climate solutions, because they are seeing income in them—the public wants to buy such solutions. Not to say that much harm can't be done by a government that opposes progress in these areas. It certainly can, and people will suffer the results, but some progress will continue in these areas despite government policies.

I have been paused in my posts on this blog by the shocking beginning of the current presidential administration. I have to keep reminding myself that the president did not win with a majority, that there are many, many people as disturbed as I am. I believe that this man won with a coalition of those who do not pay any attention to politics (so they have no idea whether a governmental action is consistent with the Constitution or the law), those who are not rich but hope to be rich soon (so they vote with the truly rich), and a minority of Americans who are rich enough to actually gain by current national political actions, and know they will. Oh, and the fundamentalist Christians who, for reasons not clear to those looking at it from the outside, think the new president represents the Second Coming. And the racists, oh my, there is probably considerable overlap among them with those who do not pay any attention.
How does one convince such an electorate that this is not the administration they want? One way is to educate those who do not know when the President is ordering something that is not in keeping with the Constitution or that is advocating breaking a law. There is some effort in this direction, and more is better.
Another avenue is to address the voters who think they will become rich in the face of strong evidence that they will not. This is a major difficulty in the U.S. Many people vote with the wealthy because they hope to be wealthy themselves. They don't want to tax the rich, for fear that they too will be rich one day. This is despite the fact that bills intended to "tax the rich" are generally talking about a level of income these people will never see. People with good jobs that make a comfortable income often think they are just a promotion, or an enterprise scheme, or an invention away from true wealth. People with a lower income may think they are only a lottery ticket, an invention, or an inheritance away. all of these are unlikely possibilities, and if they happened, they are not likely to result in the kind of income or wealth to which congressional moves to tax the rich are aimed. It is hard for the average person to wrap their head around how much money a multi-billionaire makes. I think there is a chance of showing people who think they will be rich, and so reject taxing the very rich, that they are not rational, but it is difficult, because people will think they are giving up on a dream of riches, no matter how unlikely it is that such a dream will occur.  
The fundamentalist Christian voters are probably unreachable, dedicated as they are to a nonrational belief system, and the racists are likely to go on being racist.
A group that opponents of the current administration should also consider reachable is those who didn't vote because they are cynical. The point to make is that cynicism that leads to inaction has the same political outcome as complacency. If a person opposes racism, homophobia, and climate complacency, they should vote for the party that opposes racism and homophobia and embraces ways to fight the climate crisis, and go on being cynical about other issues all they want.

Amazon's business plan is to offer whatever consumer goods people want online, from one web site, and offer to deliver it fast. As a company, they are the ultimate in factory employment, using time and motion study to get as much as possible from their warehouse workers and delivery workers. They are hoping to maximize profit by using drones to deliver some goods.
 
I do not buy from Amazon, but I had an "associate" relationship with Amazon for a fewl months several years ago thinking, "if you can't beat 'em, maybe join 'em." I got a very small amount of income through people buying my book and a couple of other things from Amazon through my site. Then California threatened to charge sales tax to Amazon buyers in the state. That very afternoon, Amazon wrote me saying they were ending my associate status. I immediately wrote back that I was also ending it. Amazon threatened to pull all of its warehouses out of California. I don't know how it ended, but I still do not shop using Amazon, and I now have a bookshop.org link on my web site, through which visitors to my web site can buy books—mine and others and support independent bookstores. I am a bookshop.org associate, so I get a very small payment when someone buys books through the link. The buyer gets a bit of a discount.
 
I am pleased not to be associated with Amazon, though I do use their website as a reference, to learn the names of publishers, publication dates, and ISBN numbers of books. They tell you this important information, though you have to scroll down quite a bit to find these details near the bottom of a book's listing.
 
Apparently, many do buy stuff from Amazon.Are there two classes in America now? Those who work for places like Amazon and feel the "whip" of time demands they can barely meet and those who enjoy the convenience of buying from such businesses? Is it like the pandemic lock-down that divided the nation into those who could work from home and order whatever they wanted through online apps and those who had to keep going to work to provide the home deliveries? Is that the division that brought us Trump?I recently read a Facebook post wondering if Walgreen's would sell less with things locked up. Someone commented that they simply stood by the locked up item and ordered it from Amazon.

You probably haven't thought about what you want nearly as hard as advertisers have thought about it. They have studied the statistics to decide if you are in the demographic that might be interested in what they sell, classified the type of consumer you represent, figured out where you might look to see advertising, and chosen the type of ad that would especially appeal to you. In the video cartoon Futurama, written by Mat t Groening, ads appear in dreams. The character who has woken up after being frozen for a thousand years objects. Other characters ask him "Didn't ads follow you around in your days? This is just an extension of the same principle." And yes, we are followed around by ads.
I once met a man whose business was to sell wholesale goods for a company that made stuff for babies. "Then," I said to him, "Your fortune is dependent on the birthrate."  "Yes, it is," he replied. His company probably didn't have enough clout to encourage people to have babies, but it would sure be in his interest to do so. Just as it was in the interest of cigarette companies to deny a link between cigarettes and lung cancer, or in the interest of oil and gas companies to scoff at wind farms or water-saving toilets (ours is a one-flush wonder, by the way) or in the interest of weapons manufacturers that there be wars.
Ads are more strident when the goods for sale are less needs than wants. We will get what we need if we can afford it, but to get what we don't need—special features, something that meets an emotional desire, something that lets us imagine ourselves rich or on the leading edge of innovation—that takes encouragement. It takes skillful ads, maybe a low price. Still, it has to meet a want—or seem to.

This is to be a blog about human desire. I will have much to say about our basic preferences as humans. (Secondarily, I will sometimes write about what some people want and others do not.) The topic of human preferences quickly involves the role of money in our lives and also involves the earth's environment, as it seems that individual choices have created a world economy that is damaging to that environment. The name is a reference to Freud's famous question: What do women want? (Answer: We are people.)

This is an introductory post, sort of a placeholder. By the end of January I will have added more posts to this  blog--check back then.