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Show Chapter II. The Belief-Desire Model of Motivation 70 One paradigmatic real-life example of Hobbes' observation would be the American growth economy. Unlike a maintenance economy, the American growth economy is driven, in part, by the desire of investors for a high return on their investments (not merely, as is often claimed, by consumer demand, population growth, or the needs of the labor force). Since different investors enter the market at different times, whatever the share price at which investors enter a particular market, they exert pressure on the relevant businesses to increase that price. Thus no share price can be high enough to satisfy investor desire for a high return. One conventional way in which a business responds to this pressure is by increasing its revenues from the product or service it sells. So just as no share price can be high enough to satisfy investor desire for a high return once and for all, similarly, therefore, no revenues can be large enough for the business thus pressured. One conventional way in which a business increases its revenues is by creating new rationales for raising its prices and new incentives for consumers to purchase its products or services. So just as no share price can be high enough and no revenues large enough, similarly no product or service price can be high enough and no quantity of sales large enough to slake investor desire. Since this system of perpetual serial pressures to increase dollar amounts is independent of the actual needs, desires and natural limitations of consumers (including, of course, investors themselves), they are continually inundated as a matter of course by "new, improved" product models, increasingly overloaded with irrelevant or confusing bells and whistles, that are regularly and rapidly introduced, withdrawn, and soon re-introduced with yet more "improvements." Consumers are also pressured into further consumption by businesses that refuse to support the products they sell for longer than the short time span they are on the market, or interlocking businesses that form a monopoly to coerce consumers into "upgrading" each product in order to use others on which it depends. Thus satisfaction of investor desire pressures businesses to maximize revenues and consumers to maximize consumption irrespective of the actual needs or desires of either. Simultaneously, serviceable and reliable products are discontinued because they pull in a steady and predictable profit rather than an escalating one that satisfies investor desire for a larger return on investments. Thus other things equal, share prices, revenues, and sales escalate at roughly the same accelerating rate at which new goods and services are introduced, forced down the consumer's throat, withdrawn, and re-introduced - accompanied by increasingly assaultive and invasive marketing techniques that rely on sex, violence, and disparities in social status to sell irrelevant goods that consumers neither want nor need and for which businesses fail to create a sufficient demand (since no quantity of demand would be sufficient). Hobbes' "perpetual and restless desire of power after power" leads inevitably to fulsome overload. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
