Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

214 What To Make of Ittends to edify customers by repeating that the product is“six ways better” but never tells them even one of the ways.A candidate’s “I will not raise your taxes” is intended tocapture your vote. “New and improved!” only pretends tobe informational.As a method of control, persuasive communication ispowerful, although like other exercises of power it does notalways succeed. One indicator of its power is that entrepreneursspend staggering amounts of money to sell their servicesand commodities. The United States, at an extreme,spends more on sales promotion than on higher education.Another indicator of the power of persuasion is the useof propaganda by ambitious politicians—Hitler, Lenin,Stalin, and Mao—to win control over entire societies. Theyshowed their appreciation of its power also by prohibitingcommunications that challenged them. With the rise of politicaldemocracy and democratic aspirations in the earlytwentieth century, dictators found outright commandharder to enforce and have turned more heavily to inducingpolitical obedience through propaganda and other forms ofpersuasive control over the citizen’s mind. Unlike command,persuasion is almost universally accepted as a legitimateform of power. It consequently reaches everywhere.Multitudes of people submit to it because they do not evenrecognize that it is a form of power.Market CircularityWith this elementary preface in mind we now ask: Is itpossible that market elite control of the mass mind goes sofar as to create, as is sometimes alleged, a high degree ofcircularity in the market system? By not responding to customers,do entrepreneurs induce them to buy what they, the