Happy Mother's Day to all my readers who happen to be mothers. I know there's a lot of you moms out there who check my blog frequently, so I'd like to take this chance to say, "Thank you" for being good mothers.

So this morning I woke up early and drove home to deliver a pot of azaleas to my momma. I think she was in a bad mood when I got there, but it never ceases to amaze me what some flowers can do to cheer up a woman. I don't get it, but I do know that her face brightened immediately when she saw the flowers.

At church, there was a special performance by the little kids for the mothers. It doesn't seem like that long ago that I was up there myself, but when I think about it, it's been almost 20 years. It's always funny to watch the kids because you see the girls are so well behaved and paying attention, but the boys are all fooling around and pushing each other.

Anyways, since I said I'd write a followup on the last blog, here it is. A page from the big book on Dudo509 Microeconomic Theory.

Advertising And The Economy

I remember a few years ago, there was an ad campaign about why advertising was good. The argument was that advertising would stimulate economic growth by increasing demand for consumer goods. Well, I do believe that advertising increases demand, which is why it is such a genius concept. And I know that more demand equals more spending equals more growth of the economy. But I also think there is a limit to how much advertising you can have before it becomes harmful, and I believe that this applies to our current economic situation.

It seems to me that the long-term result of all this advertising is that our economy becomes falsely-inflated with demand. For example, you can get people to buy more Vermont Teddy Bears by having Eddie & Jobo endorse them. This grows the GNP in the short term, but can this demand for teddy bears truly sustain the economy? In the prosperity of the late 90's, maybe... and maybe during this time it was the collective sum of demand for these teddy bears, for Playstation 2's, for Cadillac Escalades, Prada bags, etc. that was responsible for the ungodly double-digit growth in the economy.

Consumer demand was exploding, probably due in no small part to the hard work and brilliant ideas of advertisers. In turn, corporate executives saw their profits exploding and heavily invested in more, with the expectation that demand would continue to expand.

But common sense should tell us that this kind of growth is not gonna continue forever, that at some point, the bubble is going to burst. The word I used in the last blog was "saturation", and I think it's a good way to describe the effects of advertising on our nation.

The way I look at it, our economy is like a cup of distilled water. Advertising is like sugar. You add some to the cup, stir, and it smoothly dissolves, leaving no visible trace. The result is that your cup of water is sweeter, and everyone is all the happy for their sweetened water. Add a little more, the cup gets sweeter. Keep adding, and adding, and in no time you'll have quite a tasty economy.

But the thing is, anyone who has ever made Kool-Aid and been a little overzealous in the process can tell you that you can't add too much sugar to your glass of water. Add too much, and the excess sugar floats around or settles to the bottom. It's annoying, it's ugly, and it's not what you want for your cup of sweet water.

In a more accurate analogy, our cup of water would naturally grow as the population gets bigger, people get richer, and demand expands along the way. But my point is that for our given economy (cup of water), we're already beyond saturation with advertising and the artificially-generated demand that advertising creates. You might say we're "super-saturated". tee-hee *nerd alert*

Whether ads on buses or atop urinals count as "too much" is debatable, I don't know exactly where we are to draw the line. All I do know is that on the whole, there's way too much advertising for me. And my experience this morning of flipping through 6 radio stations was merely the spark that set me off on the blog I wrote.

Okay, so that was my economic theory. You probably won't find any textbooks out there comparing our economy to a cup of water, but that was the best I could come up with. Econ wasn't my major, so forgive me if none of that made sense and I sounded like a dumbass. Anyone who might have further thoughts on the subject, please make them known... i'm very interested to hear what people have to say.