Financial Markets Advisory

The reason for the exhausted housewife and the lack of savings comes from the central prediction of this book. Free markets do not just produce what we really want; they also produce what we want according to our monkey-on-the-shoulder tastes. Free markets are also about producing those wants, so we will buy what they have to sell. In the United States the goal of almost every business person (with the exception of some who sell stocks and bonds and bank accounts, which we will discuss later) is to get you to spend your money. Free markets produce continual temptation. Life is a proverbial trip to a parking lot in which you are constantly passing spaces left open for the disabled.

Just walk down a city street. The shop windows are literally there to entice you to come in and buy. Back in the old days, when both Bob and George were younger, neighborhood shopping streets would typically have a pet store, with squirming puppies in the window. There was even a well-known song about it, from a young woman who was passing by:

How much is that doggie in the window? (arf, arf)

The one with the waggley tail.

How much is that doggie in the window? (arf, arf)

I do hope that doggie’s for sale.

Those puppies were, of course, no coincidence. They were there to entice you to come in and buy. But, more generally, that “doggie in the window” is a metaphor for all of free-market activity. That “waggle tail” is everywhere we go. At the shopping mall; in the supermarket; at the auto dealer; when house-hunting: temptation is laid out for us. Just to give one example, the eggs and the milk are strategically in the back of the supermarket; they are the most common purchase; and, figuratively, you have to go through the whole store to get them, being reminded of the other needs that you might have forgotten. And when you get back to the checkout counter—waiting there—it is no coincidence that the candy and the magazines are there for you (and the kids). In the old days that used to be the home of the cigarettes: a helpful reminder for those who smoked.

This is the phish for candy and cigarettes. There are thousands more phishes in the supermarket, embodied in all the different products on the shelves, each with its own team of marketing experts and advertising campaigns, each the product of experimentation with many other possible marketing forms. And the phishing goes on beyond the supermarket, to almost everything one buys. Elizabeth Warren has emphasized the credit card. Credit cards are tempting, and we will devote part of a later chapter to that. We agree. But the idea of tempting the consumer to buy, to spend her money, is in the very nature of free markets themselves. It goes beyond the credit card. The salesman does not get paid to be his brother’s keeper, or to see that the shopper’s purchases of apples and oranges leave enough to pay the bills at the end of the month. And, as Suze Orman knows best, it takes a great deal of self-control—an inner voice saying constantly: do not do this; do not do that; you need to keep the budget within balance.

This is an extract from George A Akerlof and Robert J Shiller's Phishing For Phools published by Princeton University Press