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Jackson Houser's avatar

Also, in my comment above, I forgot two that became obvious to me later:

9. Convenience. It is nice to have several pairs of the same kind of scissors around the house.

10. Aesthetics. I don’t need three vases on the windowsill, but one is distracting and two just doesn’t look right.

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dollarsandsense's avatar

Yes, I’ve noticed that the question of demand is often dismissed by “critical” scholars (because we’re duped). Even today I can’t have a rational discussion about audience demand with most of my media studies colleagues. Too many of them insist that audiences would prefer educational media if they hadn’t been brainwashed by all that commercial media. I study the history of advertising and have had to ignore most scholarship on “consumer culture” because it is almost always a jeremiad about “capitalism” and rarely an actual analysis of what happened and why. My theory is that those critical scholars have never actually suffered want and so are dismissive of consumer desire, generally.

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