Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

70 How It Worksbenefits from the market system depends greatly on theirproviding, not denying, buyers what they want.There are great exceptions to that benign proposition. “Iowe the public nothing,” attributed, perhaps mistakenly, tothe great financier J. P. Morgan, expresses a historical hostilityof market elite to mass. When enterprises can establishsome degree of monopolistic control over their markets—acommon possibility—they are motivated to raiseprices. Earnings go up; what people get goes down. Also atthe expense of their customers, enterprises, especially largebureaucratic ones, often offer executives a variety of routesto enrichment, from embezzlement to esoteric financialploys that divert funds from the enterprise to private purses,as in the debacle of the American savings-and-loan industry.Advertising appears to be clear evidence that marketelites want to manipulate mass rather than simply respondto the preferences signaled by purchases. Yet one wonderswhy an enterprise would not prefer to sell people whateverthey want, not spending greatly, as enterprises do, to influencetheir preferences. Perhaps the most compelling explanationof sales promotion is that investment and long leadtimes are necessary to provide people with what they want.Once an enterprise sets out to satisfy potential customers,it intends to be sure that they do not then change theirminds, a situation reminiscent of early portrait photographers,who fastened the subject’s head in a metal clamp notto imprison the subject but so that a movement would notspoil the picture. The executives at Braun, as an example,are capable of a variety of entrepreneurial responses to massneeds; but, having geared up heavily to produce shavers andother appliances, they struggle to induce consumers tobuy—and buy more of—what they have prepared themselvesto sell. That would also explain why, in advance of