And more research vindicating the premise of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets,” from the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology. 

“Darwin was initially puzzled by costly traits such as peacock tails that could not be

accounted for by survival advantage; he later concluded that these were features that led to

reproductive advantage (1871). For humans, male displays of wealth may literally be a

costly signal analogue to the peacock’s tail (Miller and Todd, 1998). Displays of

prestigious consumer goods could be an honest signal of male mate value, as they would

indicate available resources as well as skills at acquiring wealth (Colarelli and Dettman,

2003). Veblen (1899/1953) remarked on the relationship between prestige and the

consumption of consumer goods and even suggested that inherited psychological

mechanisms were responsible for this relationship. Colarelli and Dettman (2003) note that

advertisers are well aware of the importance of prestige when marketing products, and will

try to associate a product with prestige even when there is no functional relationship. An

ethnographic study of Amazonian foragers and slash-and-burn farmers found that those

who had greater monetary resources allocated a greater portion of expenditures towards

luxury goods, and this tendency was stronger in men than in women (Godoy et al., 2007).

Male displays of wealth and social status may facilitate mating competition. During

ancestral times, men with greater resource control married younger women, married more

women, and produced offspring earlier (Low, 1998). Males who did not have substantial

resources or status may have been unable to establish long-term relationships. Across a

wide variety of societies, male reproductive success is a function of social and economic

status (Hopcroft, 2006). Even in current foraging societies that are relatively egalitarian,

men with higher status have more mating opportunities (Chagnon, 1992; Hill and Hurtado,

1996).

Several laboratory studies have demonstrated that situational primes making mating

effort salient can induce male intentions to increase economic power as well as allocate

financial resources to conspicuous products. Roney (2003) found that men reported

stronger ambition and desire to earn money when in the presence of attractive women. This

effect was even seen when the men simply viewed photographs of attractive women. In

another study, men who were shown photographs of attractive women had intentions to

allocate more money to conspicuous products, but not inconspicuous products

(Griskevicius et al., 2007). Neither men who viewed photographs of unattractive women,

nor women who viewed photographs of attractive or unattractive men exhibited this

pattern. In a third study, men who viewed photographs of attractive women discounted the

future more so when choosing between small monetary rewards than men who viewed

unattractive women or women who viewed pictures of men (Wilson and Daly, 2004)….”

Comment:

Marketers target our basic drives, where we tend to act with the crowd. For example,  some middle class Americans try to buy the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” in response to aggressive marketing by realtors and bankers.

But once the rise in price begins, even those who’ve adopted a more individual and rational approach are compelled to buy or rish being priced out of the market. In the Indian farming crisis, as well, farmers were lured to buy expensive seeds by very aggressive marketing that played on religious sentiment and dazzled them with the prospect of extraordinary gains. (Link to follow).

One of the things I want to explore is to whether and how libertarian language (about “free choice” and “free speech”) needs to take into account these complexities.