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Manufacturing Discontent

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Corporate power intensifies inequality, at the same time that it reduces the quality of education, the media, and public participation, and threatens human health as well as the health of the environment. — location: 349 ^ref-21378

leading intellectuals began to counsel workers that they should not interpret their lives in terms of their unsatisfying existence as workers, but rather in terms of their experiences as consumers. — location: 375 ^ref-55984

“You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” he responded in a half-whisper. — location: 411 ^ref-23809

Over and above the market forces that Wriston described, corporations have devised new legal systems to protect their interests against the will of the people. — location: 419 ^ref-40626

The World Trade Organization allows governments to take measures to punish countries that pass laws to protect the environment or the food supply. — location: 425 ^ref-22192

One of the cruel ironies of corporate society is that in many cases the worse that corporations treat people the more support they win. — location: 463 ^ref-41851

the sales of the top 200 transnational corporations are the equivalent of 27.5 per cent of world economic activity, but these same corporations employ a mere 0.78 per cent of the world’s workforce — location: 466 ^ref-21618

Indeed, people whose retirement now depends increasingly on their holdings of stocks are more likely to feel that their fate is tightly bound up with corporate profits—even though the corporate lust for profits is typically responsible for their insecure financial situation. — location: 490 ^ref-16095

Consumption replicates the problems from which it is supposed to provide a refuge. It is the devastation of creative social labor, not the retreat into shopping that deserves to be criticized. — location: 663 ^ref-38317

result, the real problem that corporations face is not scarcity but an endemic shortage of demand. — location: 711 ^ref-16463

“Fashion is infinitely superior to merit in many respects” — location: 720 ^ref-45447

importance of advertising in breaking down old habits—presumably meaning traditional patterns of consumption—in order to make consumers desirous of new needs — location: 732 ^ref-34192

he insisted that the key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction. — location: 760 ^ref-28479

in many, if not most cases, the number of new varieties offer no substantial advantage—just a variation in style. In fact, some companies are now finding that a reduction in the choices that they offer consumers actually increases sales — location: 821 ^ref-37611

Societies do not seem to become happier with an increase in income after their basic needs are met. — location: 836 ^ref-41251

In the 1960s, people increasingly began to question the value of increasing material affluence. People who had never known the hardship and deprivation associated with the Depression were coming of age. For many young people, accustomed to a comfortable standard of living, merely accumulating more material goods seemed pointless. — location: 865 ^ref-35507

markets may actually be antithetical to happiness (Lane 2000). He argues that markets put a premium on consumption, while tending to undermine those aspects of life that actually are essential to happiness—warm interpersonal relations, easy-to-reach neighbors, satisfying work, and a healthy family life. — location: 876 ^ref-18211

market forces are telling the Europeans that they must sacrifice their quality of life to remain competitive. — location: 887 ^ref-52502

Society could vastly improve the quality of life in meaningful ways by diverting the time and energy devoted to these superficial makeovers of commodities to more productive activities—better health care or education, for example. — location: 898 ^ref-38284

the greatest power of advertising lies in its ability to create dissatisfaction. — location: 932 ^ref-58959

marketers often target their appeal to the most vulnerable members of the family—children—whom they know will often succeed in coercing their parents to purchase particular products. — location: 958 ^ref-57452

Instead of consumer sovereignty, commercial sovereignty reigns supreme. Serious reporting has almost entirely disappeared from the commercial media. Besides being expensive, investigative reporting could upset sponsors. — location: 984 ^ref-29239

Would any rational person see slavery as an indicator of freedom rather than absence of choice? — location: 1050 ^ref-56642

The majority of working mothers with children under age six work more than 30 hours per week. The time demands take a toll on the family. — location: 1091 ^ref-61358

today flexibility mostly means that workers must adjust their schedules to the employer’s needs. — location: 1116 ^ref-60274

many of the same conservative politicians who speak so earnestly about their deep dedication to family values applaud proposals to increase employers’ flexibility as progressive policy—even though granting employers such flexibility is certain to disrupt the family lives of many employees. — location: 1128 ^ref-35854

Townsend suggested that fear must drive the poor because they are incapable of higher motives. — location: 1158 ^ref-49213

Society still pays lip service to the sacred institution of marriage, despite the damage that job insecurity imposes serious burdens on family life. — location: 1179 ^ref-35758

Frequent relocation makes homeownership impractical since each round of buying and selling property entails substantial costs, not to mention the direct costs of moving one’s belongings. — location: 1194 ^ref-3947

To the extent that job insecurity makes people forgo purchasing homes, they lose the opportunity to profit from the appreciation in housing prices. — location: 1196 ^ref-28571

An earlier study found that a mere 1 per cent increase in unemployment rate will lead to 37,000 deaths if sustained over six years—not just from suicide, but from homicides and the deleterious effects on people’s health — location: 1199 ^ref-13595

To the extent that the effects of unemployment traumatize children, the costs of unemployment can carry over for decades. — location: 1201 ^ref-8052

By treating workers as disposable objects, business deprives itself of its capacity to draw upon workers’ accumulated knowledge. — location: 1204 ^ref-49985

Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity” — location: 1227 ^ref-36850

Instead, trade serves to “recruit” more workers into what Karl Marx called the reserve army of the unemployed. — location: 1260 ^ref-10583

The Federal Reserve has a long tradition of using tight monetary policy to discipline labor when wages begin to rise. — location: 1274 ^ref-22137

“A large body of research shows that under stress people’s decision-making becomes less rational” — location: 1304 ^ref-14973

As long as business relies on fear to motivate workers, their performance will be less than optimal. — location: 1305 ^ref-17696

despite the shrinkage of jobs in such risky occupations, the death toll remains shockingly high. — location: 1325 ^ref-4315

far more people die from workplace injuries and diseases than from homicides. — location: 1326 ^ref-22474

In 1999, more than one-quarter of America’s nearly 150,000 meatpacking workers suffered a job-related injury or illness. — location: 1340 ^ref-41735

The government does an abysmal job of protecting workers. To begin with, the Occupational Safety and Health agency is hopelessly understaffed. — location: 1347 ^ref-34100

Animal studies indicate that across a wide range of species, creatures that find themselves in subordinate positions suffer higher levels of stress, which has serious consequences for their health (see Sapolsky 1994: 261ff). Subordinate workers seem to suffer a similar fate. — location: 1373 ^ref-43285

One study found that workers with little control in their jobs were 43 to 50 per cent more likely to die during a period of five to ten years than other workers who had high-stress jobs but more decision-making responsibilities. — location: 1381 ^ref-33197

“Passive work could represent work depleted of meaningful content. This alienating work could result in social disengagement and/or adoption of high risk behaviors that lead to mortality” — location: 1384 ^ref-32764

Rather than compensating workers for their lack of job security, average wages have been declining. — location: 1395 ^ref-61415

Once poor people in the countryside could no longer support themselves on the land, they had little choice but to attempt to work for wages. — location: 1438 ^ref-17390

As workers gradually won a shorter working day, employers became more intent on exercising their legal right to try to squeeze every second of effort out of their employees. — location: 1485 ^ref-15567

a little accommodation on the part of the employer has the potential for significant payoffs in productivity. — location: 1527 ^ref-39716

periodic rests increased workers’ productivity — location: 1531 ^ref-45567

longer hours explain almost all of the increase in the median family’s income. — location: 1569 ^ref-25487

relatively little of the total working time in the United States actually goes to productive work. Instead, more and more time goes into activities that do little to improve the quality of life—work such as marketing, advertising, and financial speculation. — location: 1580 ^ref-55467

“I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain, than in the near certainty that men and women of equal talent have lived and died in cottonfields and sweatshops” — location: 1591 ^ref-27702

superiors hold their subordinates accountable. Subordinates rarely, if ever, get the opportunity to apply those same standards of accountability to their superiors. — location: 1960 ^ref-59527

while demanding accountability from others, those in power consider themselves above accountability, apparently because they already know how wonderful their performance is. — location: 1961 ^ref-2067

The precautionary principle shifts the burden of proof regarding the safety of any new technology to those who wish to introduce it. — location: 2769 ^ref-30616

In the popular vision of a laissez-faire economy, the democratic rights of the individual represent one of the most treasured virtues of a market economy. By this logic, those who want to interfere with the market are fundamentally undemocratic. — location: 3425 ^ref-21299

What political involvement exists for individuals largely involves periodic elections. But even here, public participation is pitifully small. Above all, money, not people, determines elections. — location: 3556 ^ref-13393

Within this perverse system virtually nobody can make a significant run for public office without the support of the rich and powerful. — location: 3563 ^ref-39407

By providing only embarrassingly superficial information, television stations leave candidates little choice but to purchase advertising to get their message across. The public then chooses which politician to select just as people decide whether to buy Coke or Pepsi. — location: 3569 ^ref-46129

environment, politics is fast merging with entertainment. After all, celebrities already have far-reaching name recognition. — location: 3573 ^ref-22192

Of those people who do bother to vote, many, if not most, rely heavily on information from the appalling coverage on television, more often than not making the election of the most qualified candidates unlikely, if not impossible. — location: 3585 ^ref-57817

First, corporations actually develop relatively few innovative ideas; instead, innovative ideas generally evolve out of a complex pattern of science and technology that originates in the public sphere, specifically government or university financed research and development — location: 3596 ^ref-16881

Second, much of this supposed creation of value is nothing more than the exercise of uncompetitive market power to extract the larger costs from customers. Think of the Nike shoes that only cost a few dollars to manufacture, probably selling for fifty times as much to the retail customer. — location: 3598 ^ref-33651

firms’ profits owe more to the shifting of costs onto others rather than to the creation of value. — location: 3600 ^ref-26119

It [The corporation] is an enemy of democracy in all its forms …. If the corporation is not to defeat democracy then democracy must defeat the corporation— — location: 3636 ^ref-29315

Democracy proclaims the priority of the political over the economic; the modern corporation rebuts that claim by its very existence. — location: 3638 ^ref-49626