Household Debt/Income

[Birdjaguar]

Ads would be fine if they weren't shoved down our throats in every single imaginable aspect of life. They would also be fine if we weren't living in a consumerist society.. but we do and they are..

The frequency and prevalence of advertising is a different problem than the ads themselves.

 

[Samson]

Revenue? Or are you only counting hard goods? When I was in the catalog business we printed and mailed many many thousands catalogs as advertising. People bought stuff and we kept 300 people employed plus those from whom we bought the products. Our customers decided what we sold. If they bought lots of product A we added more like that in the next catalog. If product B didn't sell, it might just disappear.

There is a difference between a catalogue and a coke advert.

Ads would be fine if they weren't shoved down our throats in every single imaginable aspect of life. They would also be fine if we weren't living in a consumerist society.. but we do and they are..

You know, with this whole isolation thing I hardly ever see adverts. The only place I see them is that 1 every half hour for Qatar airlines that Al Jazeera runs.

 

[Birdjaguar]

There is a difference between a catalogue and a coke advert.

Yes, we pushed 400 products into peoples faces rather than just one. The goal though was the same: "Choose me!"

 

[Samson]

Yes, we pushed 400 products into peoples faces rather than just one. The goal though was the same: "Choose me!"

Yeah, but the customers goal was different. Peoples goal when they picked up your catalogue was to buy some stuff in your catalogue. When people see a coke ad they actually want to be watching football, or the film or whatever.

We want a way of buying stuff, but we do not need to spend one out of every hundred dollars on convincing people to buy more stuff that does not make them happy.

 

[uppi]

Revenue? Or are you only counting hard goods?

I would say value as in benefit to humanity. To some degree, advertising informs people of options and thus help the efficient allocation of resources. However, current advertising consumes much more resources than this. And that is not even counting the misinformation caused by advertising.

Revenue or employment is not a value of its own in my view, because these people could be doing something more productive with their time.

 

[innonimatu]

Why has the conversation shifted to consumerism instead of income?

People want to consume. One may raise some environmental objections to that, but generally the desire to consume is understandable, and it would be good if people consumed better-quality (less disposable) stuff. So the problem is one of income. Lack of income is what drives up debt. Income is sucked into rents, other expenses get covered with increasing debt. This suits the "investor" class just fine because they make their money ultimately on increasing debt. The "money" is in fact claims on other people: debt. The wealthy cannot keep getting wealthier unless the stock of debt keeps growing.

If you want to end the debt problem you need to shift political power in society away from the wealthy into the workers. Enabling the increase of their income and the reduction of the debt stock. It is impossible to reduce the debt stick without reducing the accumulated debt of the wealthier class. The assets of the wealthy are essentially other people's debts, and other people's needs which force those people to pay rents.

If you have capitalism, you need strong unions as described here to even have a hope of averting snowballing debt. Constant accumulation of wealth depends on growing debt. Capitalist "stability" (a misnomer, it's just extending the time to crisis), the averting of crisis where the wealthy lose a lot of money, can only be achieved by continuously increasing debt. Make interest rates zero and theoretically it could go on and on... except that the wealthy then accumulate all assets and charge increasingly oppressive rents on them also. Hence the "housing crisis" so many people who thought themselves of as middle class complain about.

As the wealth transfer continues society slides into a kind of neofeudalism... but it's not feudalism, make no mistake. The state remains all powerful and can change the rues in a moment, make or break the wealthy class. Their losses were averted in 2008, are still being averted, their wealth accumulation continuing, because they are the one class protected by the state, benefiting from control over public policy making. The policy makers come from that class...

 

[Birdjaguar]

Which income levels (quintiles?) have the highest percent of total household debt and which ones have the highest debt to income percent?

In total, American consumers held $14.96 trillion in debt at the end of June — the biggest pile of bills on record and $812 billion more than what was owed at the end of 2019, before the pandemic hit.

Credit card balances rose by $17 billion in the second quarter, but they still remain $140 billion below levels at the end of 2019. Auto loan balances increased by $33 billion.

Mortgage debt, the single biggest contributor to overall household debt, rose $282 billion to $10.44 trillion. A whopping 44% of the outstanding balances were originated over the past year, accounting for both new mortgages and refinancings.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/03/economy/us-household-debt-pandemic/index.html

 

[warpus]

You know, with this whole isolation thing I hardly ever see adverts. The only place I see them is that 1 every half hour for Qatar airlines that Al Jazeera runs.

There is a guy jumping outside my window with a big "BUY COKE" sign

jk but yeah, you're right. However, I have been taking in a lot more streaming media than before the pandemic, and there's ads there too.

The frequency and prevalence of advertising is a different problem than the ads themselves.

I was speaking more about the broader culture of consumption we live in and pointing to the overabundance of ads as a sign of it.